A little light reading

For those of you with little or no geekyness in your bodies, stop now. Don’t read any further. Seriously you will just think this whole post is stupid.

Ok now that we have got rid of all the half-wits and people who can’t follow instructions (don’t feel insulted, I did warn you)…

I read this interesting article today on how to measure the speed of light using chocolate sweets. And whilst that was interesting enough the real fascinating stuff happened in the comments. I’m still not sure if the people were joking or being serious, but one discussion thread started by berating the author for saying the speed of light was in fact 299,792,458 meters per second and not the 669,600,000 miles per hour the commenter saw on NASA’s website (although why we should rely on NASA’s website as a true reflection I don’t know, they are apparently the space agency who is not allowed to go into space).

Any hoo, the discerning reader (which should be most of you since we sifted the chaff in the first sentence) will note that 669,600,000 miles per hour is in fact still the incorrect speed which in miles per hour is 670 616 629. So NASA it appears was either misquoted or wrong.

The argument that ensued is typical of opinionated people who don’t like to check their facts. Go have a look it is all here.

The comment that sparked this blog post was this one:

I think the lesson to be learned here is that there is still disagreement among the scientific community. It’s possible we’ll never know the actual speed of light

To which I respond with a big fat WRONG. The speed of light has in fact been defined.

Its value is exactly 299,792,458 metres per second,… in vacuum, where there are no atoms, molecules or other types of matter that can slow it down.

It is the basic unit of distance measurement, it is rather the metre that is the difficult one to nail down as recently the length of a metre has been defined as:

the distance travelled by light in free space in 1/299,792,458 of a second.

So there! now I feel smart again, back to the mind numbing process of writing database cleaners.

I am still going to try the chocolates in a microwave experiment. You?

Oh and if your nose is still out of joint cause I called you a half-wit, I was only kidding, no seriously I’m not being sarcastic. Promise.

Related Posts:

• Oh my word