Item of Interest

Item of Interest.
I was in some kind of meeting; I don’t remember what it was. I hope it wasn’t a church service. It was either very boring, or didn’t apply to me, or I couldn’t hear. And obviously I didn’t have a book to read. In the back of my mind was something I had read, or someone said something, that got me thinking about the speed of light. We all know it travels on a normal day at 186,000 miles a second. If light travels on a cruise control that means it travels 567 billion 648 million miles a year. That’s about 23 billion times around the earth. I realized that was pretty fast, so I began to think of some way to put it into perspective. We know that it takes 8 minutes for the light of the sun to reach earth. That means that the sun is 93 million miles away. But that still doesn’t give a lot of perspective. I decided to get it down into something I could grasp.
I decided that the 8 minute travel time of light from the sun to earth would be a point of reference. So instead of putting it into minutes I would put it into inches or feet. So assuming for comparison that light traveled one mile a year, which is 5,280 feet, or 63.360 inches. I used “Oakie” math, with a touch of “Arkie” arithmetic tossed in. After a lot of figuring I determined that light from the sun would have traveled approximately 2 and ¼ inches when it hit the earth. That would be the same as saying that if the light left the sun at 12:00 AM, Jan. 1 it would reach the earth at 12:08 AM Jan 1.
Well, the good news is that I reached this conclusion just as the meeting was dismissed, and ended up enjoying myself, instead of being bored to the point of anger. I am writing this because in cleaning my desk I found the piece of paper I figured it on, and knew if I did not write it down, considering the number of inches I have lived, I would soon forget it. Dale 10/1/09