What makes the light go so fast? What exactly is the definition of light?.....?

Question

Is only one single atom or electron going at 186000 miles per hour considered as light?

Answer 1

"...What makes the light go so fast?..." Asking why light travels as fast as it does is a useless question because there's no answer. Light behaves as it does because that's just the way it worked out in our universe.

"...What exactly is the definition of light?..." Light is electromagnetic radiation in many forms. For example radio signals, radar beams, lasers, visible light, xrays, etc.,. Light can behave both as a series of waves (..sort of like sound waves), or as a stream of individual particles. Light is said to be invariant, that is it moves at only one velocity regardless of how fast its source might move. The carrier of light energy is the 'photon' which has a tiny mass, but only when its not moving, and since light is never motionless under usual conditions it actually has no mass.

"...Is only one single atom or electron going at 186000 miles per hour considered as light?..." No! Atoms and electrons and other subatomic particles all have mass, and nothing with mass can move at the speed of light.

Answer 2

Light is one of the forms of transformation of energy from one point to another point.

The distance travelled per unit time is the speed of light energy tdransformation.

If we consider the energy as not a continuous one but as discrete bundles of energy, then each bundle of energy is called photon and hence we can say that photons travel with a particular speed.

They are not atoms because atoms are matter and photon is energy particle.

So far there is no answer for the question why energy should travel from one place to another place.

Answer 3

Only photons (which are the partical dual of an electromagnetic wave) travel an the speed of light. Light is an electromagnetic wave (or a particle called a photon, depending on what you're doing with it) If you don't understand wave-partical duality, go back to your Physics book and study some more.


Doug




Doug

Answer 4

Light is both a wave(electro-magnetic) and a particle(photon)...

The wavelength or the frequency determines the amount of energy the photons contains...

Photons have 0 rest mass.

No matter can travel at the speed of light because that requires infinite energy which the universe does not contain.

Answer 5

in reality there is really no things as fast or slow. we perceive light so fast because compare to other objects, it made a huge different. but compare to the vastness of the universe, light is slower than snail. light is a form of energy and it travels so fast maybe because its a energy.

Answer 6

Light is electromagnetic radiation with a wavelength that is visible to the eye (visible light) or, in a technical or scientific context, electromagnetic radiation of any wavelength [citation needed]. The elementary particle that defines light is the photon. The three basic dimensions of light (i.e., all electromagnetic radiation) are:

* Intensity (or amplitude), which is related to the human perception of brightness of the light,
* Frequency (or wavelength), perceived by humans as the colour of the light, and
* Polarization (or angle of vibration), which is only weakly perceptible by humans under ordinary circumstances.

Due to the wave-particle duality of matter, light simultaneously exhibits properties of both waves and particles. The precise nature of light is one of the key questions of modern physics.

The speed of light in a vacuum is exactly 299,792,458 metres per second (fixed by definition). Although some people speak of the "velocity of light", the word velocity is usually reserved for vector quantities, which have a direction.

The speed of light has been measured many times, by many physicists. The best early measurement in Europe is by Ole Rømer, a Danish physicist, in 1676. By observing the motions of Jupiter and one of its moons, Io, with a telescope, and noting discrepancies in the apparent period of Io's orbit, Rømer calculated that light takes about 18 minutes to traverse the diameter of Earth's orbit. If he had known the diameter of the orbit in kilometres (which he didn't) he would have deduced a speed of 227,000 kilometres per second (approximately 141,050 miles per second).

The first successful measurement of the speed of light in Europe using an earthbound apparatus was carried out by Hippolyte Fizeau in 1849. Fizeau directed a beam of light at a mirror several thousand metres away, and placed a rotating cog wheel in the path of the beam from the source to the mirror and back again. At a certain rate of rotation, the beam could pass through one gap in the wheel on the way out and the next gap on the way back. Knowing the distance to the mirror, the number of teeth on the wheel, and the rate of rotation, Fizeau measured the speed of light as 313,000 kilometres per second.

Léon Foucault used rotating mirrors to obtain a value of 298,000 km/s (about 185,000 miles/s) in 1862. Albert A. Michelson conducted experiments on the speed of light from 1877 until his death in 1931. He refined Foucault's results in 1926 using improved rotating mirrors to measure the time it took light to make a round trip from Mt. Wilson to Mt. San Antonio in California. The precise measurements yielded a speed of 186,285 mi/s (299,796 km/s [1,079,265,600 km/h]). In daily use, the figures are rounded off to 300,000 km/s and 186,000 miles/s.