Fun Facts
I would like to introduce you to a new category on my blog: Fun Facts.
Fun Facts will be all about facts, misconceptions and trivia with numbers. I will be showing numbers with a scale of 9 places. In a future post I will explain some of the silliness with high accuracy fractional numbers. Just something to keep you coming back for more.
So without further delay lets start with some constants.
299,792,458 is the Speed of Light or the speed at which electromagnetic radiation travels through a vacuum. Lets have some fun with the Speed of Light.
Speed of Light:
Meters per second: 299,792,458.000000000
Kilometers per second: 299,792.458000000
Feet per second: 983,571,057.925474200
Yards per second: 327,857,019.308491400
Miles per second: 186,282.397334370
Miles per hour: 670,616,630.403732000
Wow, 670,616,630 miles per hour - that’s darn fast. It also happens to be the universal speed limit. Lets play with this number.
Distance from New York, New York to Los Angles, California: 2,462 miles. Time for Light to travel from NY to LA and back: 0.026432984 seconds. It takes the average person 35/100ths of a second to blink their eyes, in this time Light can travel from NY to LA and back 13.241032491 times. 13 times in the course of one blink. Think about that the next time you try to outrun the light getting into your bed. Let us play with something larger.
The circumference of Earth at sea level is 24,901.316474981 miles. That is 2.618288847 blinks of your eye or 0.133675091 seconds.
The distance from the Earth’s surface to the Moon’s is 233,813.777894568 miles. Light leaving the Earth will arive on the Moon in 1.255157659 seconds.
Now lets play with it the other away around. If you could travel at the Speed of Light, how far would you go in x amount of time? Let look:
1 minute: 11,176,943.840062200 miles
1 hour: 670,616,630.403732000 miles
1 day: 16,094,799,129.689568000 miles
1 week: 112,663,593,907.826976000 miles
1 month: 482,843,973,890.687040000 miles
1 year: 5,874,601,682,336.692320000 miles
5 years: 29,373,008,411,683.461600000 miles
25 years: 146,865,042,058,417.308000000 miles
Proxima Centauri is our nearest star. At 4.2 Light Years away that is 24,673,327,065,814.107744000 miles!
That’s all for now. There is so much more to come so stick around!
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