I’m Fixing to Speed Things Up a Little Bit
I’m fixing to speed things up a little bit.
Speed can be a wonderful and blessed thing. Mohammed Ali claimed to be so fast that he could turn the light off and be in bed before the room got dark. That’s pretty fast, considering the speed of light.
But before we consider the wonders of the speed of light, let’s lead up to it gradually by expounding on the speed of sound, which is somewhat slower than light. Sound travels at 768 miles per hour (MPH) and produces a phenomenon called the sonic boom when an object exceeds that rate of speed.
A sonic boom is the sound associated with the shock waves created by an object traveling through the air (presumably a military aircraft) faster than the speed of sound, sounding much like an explosion, and could explain the big “booms” sometimes heard overhead with no other obvious explanation.
Now when you graduate from the speed of sound to the speed of light it’s way more than going from T-ball to major league. It’s like going from a flickering candle to being face-to-face with the sun in one-hundredth of the blink of an eye.
How about going from 768 MPH to 11,176,920 MPH. That’s the difference in the speed of sound compared to the speed of light. If you want to be a little more precise—light travels at 186,282 miles per second. That’s faster then NASCAR!
Here’s were it gets interesting. If you traveled at the speed of light from one end of the Milky Way to the other it would take you 100,000 years, so it stands to reason that we ain’t going because it would be impossible for a human being or any other physical object to accelerate to light speed from being at rest on this good earth.
However, if it were possible and you were interviewed upon your arrival at the other side of the Milky Way, you would report that the trip happened instantaneously for you while everything you knew before you left would have been gone for 100,000 years! So in theory, you could travel forward in time if you could exceed the speed of light.
I don’t think I’m going to try it because Mr. Einstein didn’t say anything about there being a reverse, so you probably couldn’t get back home if you wanted to.
Besides, I’m just trying to travel to town in time to get to the Dairy Queen before it’s fixing to close.