Visualizing the Speed of Light and Speed of Sound

the speed of light is nearly instantaneous you can tell so by turning on a light regardless of the distance between you and the light source there is never a visible delay the speed of sound on the other hand is far slower you can experience this by being in a large open area where you can hear the delay of your echo bouncing off distant rocks before it travels back to you when light and sound are being perceived together this discrepancy in speeds can deceive you an example of this is when you're trying to locate a plane in the sky from its sound only to realize it's far ahead of where it sounds like it is let's try to visualize and compare the speed of sound and light to understand how much quicker the speed of light is than sound to visualize the speed of sound we'll need something considerably large the golden gate bridge in san francisco california the span between both towers is 1280 meters this is a great distance to see how quickly sound can get from one side to the other i'll use a bullet to represent the speed of sound as some nine millimeter bullets travel the speed of sound 343 meters every second if i shot a bullet from one tower to the other it would reach the second tower in 3.7 seconds this is what the speed of sound looks like bouncing from tower to tower in real time the speed of light on the other hand is a lot quicker to visualize the speed of light we will need an object so large that we will need the whole planet planet earth the earth's circumference is 40 075 kilometers at its equator this is nothing for the speed of light as it is able to circle the earth seven and a half times every second [Music] let's zoom out to see the speed of light traveling between the earth and the moon the moon is 384 400 kilometers away it takes the speed of light only 1.28 seconds if a light source was heading to the sun the sun being 147 million 450 000 kilometers away it would take light eight minutes and 20 seconds one way [Music] so the next time you are perceiving light and sound together like watching someone play basketball just remember in the time that sound can travel from one tower on the golden gate bridge to the other light can travel to the moon back to earth and to the moon once again back at the court these drastic variations and speeds can be experienced up close you can hear and see the ball hit the ground at the same time without a delay but if you're far enough away the speed of sound has enough time to begin to visibly fall behind the speed of light thanks for watching and please consider subscribing

Channel: Animations Xplaned

Views: 5,374,953

Keywords: Speed of light, Speed of sound, Lightspeed

Id: yGZwLFPLB0o

Length: 3min 1sec (181 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 08 2020