Tag Archives: speedoflight

Blog 4: Explaining Relativistic time dilation

Posted on March 2, 2024 by matthewastro

Time seems to be one of the only immutable aspects of the universe, besides death and taxes. Many people believe that the passage of time is altogether unstoppable and unyielding. And for most intensive purposes, they are right. Indeed, time is our most precious resource and one that many of believe we have an extremely […] Continue reading →

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The Speed of Light

Posted on January 23, 2024 by Tejas Mahesh

In 1905, Albert Einstein took the first crack at the Newtonian foundational physics. In his paper on special relativity, Albert Einstein postulated that the speed of light, c, is constant in all inertial reference frames. Assume that a person on a bicycle is holding a flashlight and moving at a constant speed relative to someone […] Continue reading →

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Blog 1 – Light Speed

Posted on January 22, 2024 by Jack Abrams

The speed of light is a fascinating topic that has significance from everyday life to the vast expanse of the cosmos. The speed of light is the speed at which light travels through a medium, and for a vacuum, this speed has been defined as 299,792,458 m/s. This speed is almost incomprehensible to us due […] Continue reading →

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The Ultimate Race

Posted on January 22, 2023 by jackdoyle25

We take it for granted that the speed of light is the universal speed limit; nothing can go faster than light. The knowledge of light-years is crucial to understanding the images that we see in the night sky. These images are not of the celestial bodies as they currently exist, but as they once were, […] Continue reading →

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Galactic Time Travel

Posted on January 29, 2022 by timmyshaheen

In the picture above, Leia looks towards the night sky and the lights of the stars from her Galaxy. She remarks how the light from the destruction of her planet has yet to reach them yet, and she imagines that she could just get into a spaceship and go see her planet alive and well. […] Continue reading →

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What the heck is a light year?

Posted on February 7, 2021 by astronomywithannie

You’ve probably heard the term light year a lot. You likely heard a planet or star described as a certain number of light years away. But what exactly is a light year? And why do we use light to measure time and distance? How fast does it really go? Light moves at approximately 300,000 kilometersContinue reading “What the heck is a light year?” Continue reading →

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The Discovery of the Speed of Light

Posted on February 6, 2021 by allyworthington

While Aristotle believed that light could travel instantaneously, the first experimental attempt to measure the speed of light came from Galileo Galilei in 1667. He placed two people with covered lights on the top of hills that were about a mile apart. The first person was instructed to uncover his light, and when the second … Continue reading The Discovery of the Speed of Light → Continue reading →

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Breaking “c” and the Warping of Space-time

Posted on March 14, 2020 by Phillip Yoon

The speed of light, often denoted by the constant “c,” is faster than anything that we know. Although there have been attempts to get certain particles to travel faster than the speed of light, like when scientists at the CERN laboratory in Switzerland tried to get a hold of neutrinos, no one has successfully brokenContinue reading “Breaking “c” and the Warping of Space-time” Continue reading →

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Traveling at the Speed of Light

Posted on January 20, 2019 by Aaron Molotsky

Have you ever imagined what it would be like moving at the speed of light? To have the ability to travel that quickly (think ~300,000,000 m/s) would be incomprehensible — you’d experience a host of different effects, including time dilation (how more rapidly moving objects experience time more slowly), relativistic aberration (how your field of … Continue reading Traveling at the Speed of Light → Continue reading →

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Putting the speed of light into perspective

Posted on January 23, 2018 by terranojm

The theory of special relativity tells us that there is an absolute speed limit in the universe, that being the speed of light. At a speed of about 300,000 km/s, light takes only one second to travel to the Moon from Earth and eight minutes to travel to the Sun from Earth. This speed is … Continue reading “Putting the speed of light into perspective” Continue reading →

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