AaS! 124: Why is the speed of light the way it is?
Ask a Spaceman!
Paul M. Sutter
4.8 • 853 Ratings
🗓️ 17 March 2020
⏱️ 36 minutes
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Summary
Why is the speed of light so important in physics? Why does the value not matter at all? And why does it have the speed that it does? I discuss these questions and more in today’s Ask a Spaceman!
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Hosted by Paul M. Sutter, astrophysicist and the one and only Agent to the Stars (http://www.pmsutter.com).
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Let's face it. |
| 0:11.5 | The speed of light is weird. |
| 0:15.8 | And like most weird things in the universe, the more you think about it, the weirder it gets |
| 0:20.2 | until you reach a point where the weirder it gets until you reach |
| 0:21.0 | a point where the weirdness is so overwhelming that you just stop thinking about it altogether |
| 0:25.8 | and go about your life pretending that the whole thing never happened. |
| 0:30.5 | But here we are, you and me. |
| 0:33.2 | And we're going to think about the speed of light. |
| 0:36.3 | A lot. |
| 0:37.1 | And it's going to get weirder and |
| 0:39.2 | weirder as we go. And at the end of this episode, nobody will be satisfied. You won't be |
| 0:46.2 | satisfied. I won't be satisfied. We'll be left with a half hour of thoughts and ramblings |
| 0:51.7 | that seem to be building up to something only to lead |
| 0:55.2 | absolutely nowhere because, and I'm telling you this, to save your sanity now, we have basically |
| 1:04.4 | no idea what's going on. Like I said, the speed of light is weird. So, let's get weird. |
| 1:14.2 | Let's start with the number itself. |
| 1:15.9 | The speed of light is defined to be 299,792,458 meters per second. |
| 1:25.1 | Wait a minute. |
| 1:27.1 | Defined? Defined? Seriously, defined? The speed of light is defined to be a certain |
| 1:34.5 | number? How does this even work? Isn't the whole point of science to sit there and listen to the |
| 1:40.1 | whispers of Mother Nature and not run around telling her what to do? Who are we? Barely |
| 1:46.7 | sentient apes on some poduck planet orbiting a very boring star in some random spiral galaxy |
... |
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