2006-12-18 02:36:00 · 21 answers · asked by mayur g 1 in Science & Mathematics ➔ Other - Science
Light. The speed of electricity varies depending on what the electrical current is flowing through, but in copper wires it's about 1/3 the speed of light and it can never go faster than light. Fire doesn't have a speed, it burns things, but every material is different, so there's no specific speed.
Nothing can go faster than the speed of light.
2006-12-18 02:43:07 · answer #1 · answered by Anonymous · 0⤊ 0⤋
Light
2006-12-18 15:44:20 · answer #2 · answered by omicron 1 · 0⤊ 0⤋
Light
Fire
Electricity
That is the order of the relative speeds of these occurances.
People *think* electricity travels at the speed of light, but it is in fact very, very slow. The net effect is quite rapid, and it promotes the myth that it is fast, but it is not. I am talking about standard electricity that all our devices function by; refrigerators, lights, computers....everything.
Granted, fire is very relative because its speed is dependent on the nature of its fuel and availability of oxygen, but if you look at a fire that starts in a house, or a forest, it's rate of progress is much faster, on average than an electron traveling from a switch on your wall, thru the wiring and to a light say 20 feet away. It would take that electron *about* 40 hours to transit that distance. It would certainly *not* take that long for a fire to travel that far.
Hence my ordering of those three things.
2006-12-18 06:11:46 · answer #3 · answered by Anonymous · 0⤊ 0⤋
Light. The next fastest is electricity which travels through copper wire at about 7/10 the speed of light. Fire varies greatly depending on the burn rate of the combustible.
2006-12-18 02:45:24 · answer #4 · answered by Anonymous · 1⤊ 0⤋
Theoretically, light and electricity travel the same speed, but the speed depends on the medium in which it travels...
Light travels faster through space than through water.
Electricity travels faster through silver than it does copper.
Fire? I wouldn't say that fire "moves" so much as it "spreads". The heat you feel, however is either in the form of radiation below the frequency of light or hot air, which is much slower.
2006-12-18 02:40:49 · answer #5 · answered by Bugmän 4 · 0⤊ 1⤋
Light is the fastest.
However, electricity will travel at the speed of light only when placed inside of a vacuum.
2006-12-19 09:51:01 · answer #6 · answered by ncpropes 3 · 0⤊ 0⤋
Did you know that if you were traveling alongside a beam of light and you were going 1/4 the speed of light, the speed of the lightbeam would still be going the speed of light faster that you? This was part of the theory of relativity that Einstein was working on. You know, E=MC squared.
If something were traveling alongside a lightbeam, and it were going 1/2 the speed of light, or 2/3s the speed of light for that matter, the distance between the "something" and the lightbeam would still be the speed of light. Strange, huh?
2006-12-18 05:28:34 · answer #7 · answered by scrapmetal 2 · 0⤊ 0⤋
Indeed, an individual electron may take minutes to get through a piece of wire in it's random motion, but there are MILLIONS of the buggers, all waiting to get into the circuit, and the INSTANT that one enters,another one pops out the other side,equating it to the speed of light....ask any rocket,or your average nuclear explosion how quick it is, I'm not fired up enough to know...
2006-12-18 07:53:38 · answer #8 · answered by Anonymous · 0⤊ 0⤋
i know that fire is not the fastest.but light and electricity are close but in a race light would win.
2006-12-18 02:40:46 · answer #9 · answered by SPAZ 3 · 0⤊ 0⤋
Light and electricity both travel at the speed of light. Fire doesn't have a constant speed.
2006-12-18 02:40:05 · answer #10 · answered by Shane W 2 · 1⤊ 2⤋