The speed of light is 299,792,458 m / s, what is the speed of darkness?

Category GizAsk - ask Gizmodo newspaper anything related to science, they will . go ask other experts in the industry to answer questions that readers have . Mankind's questions are inherently difficult to solve, and most of us can hardly find the answer even though it takes many hours of Google continuously.

The question this time is a bit 'dark' .

The speed of light remains one of the most important constants of physics, and since light has existed since the dawn of time, philosophers and scientists from ancient times have made certain observations about light: Aristotle and Empedocles have long since disagreed; Aristotle believed that light was capable of moving immediately, while Greek scientist Empedocles thought that because light moved, it certainly took time to move between the two points.

The light will move at a fixed speed, no matter how fast the observer moves.

In 1667, Galileo Galilei stood from the top of the hill, observing the speed at which a lantern was opened and covered in the hands of his fellow experimenters, trying to calculate the speed of light. They stood only less than a mile (1.6 km) apart so it was hard to tell the difference. Galileo only estimated that the speed of light was 10 times faster than sound.

It wasn't until the 1670s that astronomer Ole Rømer relied on the eclipse of Jupiter's moon to calculate the speed of light. He realized that light takes a certain amount of time to reach Earth, when observing an eclipse will be slow when Jupiter is farthest from Earth, and very punctual when Earth and Jupiter are near. more each other.

That's why Rømer believes that ' light travels in space at a certain speed ', and then estimates that it takes about 10-11 minutes for the sun to reach Earth. Although the figure is skewed from the actual number (8 minutes 19 seconds), scientists still have an important number to conduct research. At that time, Römer calculated the speed of light was 200,000 km / s.

Ole Rømer, one of the most important names in physics.

The speed of light passed through the heads of a number of eminent scientists, such as Hippolyte Fizeau and Léon Foucault from France, Prussian-American Albert Michelson, and when Albert Einstein began writing scientific reports about it in 1905. , the speed of light comes with a concept few people thought of at the time - the theory of special relativity. He suggested that light will travel at a fixed speed, no matter how fast the observer moves.

Does the scientific world discriminate over gloom or how does one see the work that indicates the speed of darkness? Gizmodo went to ask a bunch of experts about black holes and about quantum physics, getting very interesting answers.

George Muster

Editors of two leading scientific journals, Scientific American and Nautilus, the author of the book, Remote Bizarre Activity: The Event of Redefining Space and Time - and its Meaning to the Black Hole, Big Bang and The Theory of Everything, and the Guide to String Theory for Fools.

The speed of darkness? The simple answer is that it is the speed of light. Turn off the Sun, the Earth will also darken after 8 minutes. But simple is boring! First, what we are used to calling 'the speed of light' is actually the speed of the transmission , and it is not always the determinant of the final speed figure. For example, as the light on the top of the lighthouse rotates, the speed of the shadow it creates on the ground increases gradually as it gets farther away from the lighthouse.

If the light from the lighthouse is directed at you at 12 o'clock, you will notice that the light flashes a bit slowly.

If you stand far enough from the lighthouse, its shadow gliding over your head will be faster than the speed of mechanical light transmission (in the Universe, neutron stars are the proof of this phenomenon). In the aforementioned cases, the speed of light has its own delay: if the light from the lighthouse hits you at 12 o'clock, you will notice that the light flashes a bit slowly. However, the speed of things happening at the point you stand does not change.

By the way, does darkness really exist? If we could turn off the Sun, the Earth wouldn't sink in eternity. Light from stars, nebulae, and explosions in space will flood the sky. This planet and everything on it, including our bodies, emits infrared light. Depending on how the sun is turned off to see how it will continue to shine. Humans still have eyesight, we will still be able to see something. No mechanism of light reception can identify a complete darkness, because if nothing emits a light source, quantum vibrations can also produce light. Even the black hole, the darkest object we have ever known, emits its own light. Physics is different from real life, light always shatters darkness.

Darkness does not belong to the physical category, but rather is a state of awareness. Whether the photon hits our eyes, does the cell on the retina record light to stimulate the brain to make an image, does not explain how the brain perceives darkness, it is as mysterious as The length of the wavelength represents the perception of colors and sounds. The experience of human consciousness varies from time to time, but the nature of such experiences is not influenced by time. In this sense, darkness will not have speed.

Neil DeGrasse Tyson

The director of Hayden Planetarium, the deputy director of research and also the founder of the Astrophysical Division, based at the Natural History Museum, is the host of the Space: Adventures of Space-Time.

The speed of darkness . Think of light as the darkness. The speed of light that dispels darkness is the speed of light, so the speed of darkness will be the negative number of the speed of light . If light were a vector, having directions and magnitudes, then its negative numbers would be negative. The night melts away at a faster rate as it spreads out, I'll call it the speed of negative light.

David Reitze

Director at the LIGO Laboratory of the California Institute of Technology

Basically, the speed of darkness depends on two things, either you are the material swallowed by the infinite darkness of a black hole, or you stand far enough away to see something fall into the eternal black abyss. If you were the unlucky material to fall into a black hole, the speed would certainly be very high, equivalent to the speed of light.

If you are the observer and stand far enough away to witness the incident, the rate at which matter is swallowed by the black hole will be greatly slowed, due to an effect known as the time dilation due to gravity - the clock runs much slower when standing in a large gravitational field, and more slowly when near the black hole event horizon.

'From far enough' means your position relative to the black hole, far enough away for you and the watch you carry without being influenced by the gravity of the black hole. In fact, for a person watching from afar, it would take them an endless amount of time to witness something drifting into the black hole event horizon.

Sarah Caudill

Researcher at the Leonard E. Parker Center for Gravity, Cosmology and Physics, at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.

The gravity of a black hole is so strong that light does not escape its event horizon. Because of the intense gravitational force, time dilation will affect observations made from outside this very strong gravitational field.

For example, when a person standing from afar observes a glowing object falling into a black hole, they will see it slowly falling and disappearing, and then it will come a time when we don't see the tiny dot of light anymore. This observer will not be able to see the object beyond the event horizon.

We can also observe from the perspective of the very object that is falling into the black hole. For example, when a star crumbles when it accidentally encounters a black hole, the gas from that star will form a large accretion disk around the black hole and slowly be sucked inside. However, matter from the star into the black hole does not happen immediately.

There is a certain speed limit, caused by radiation pressure from inside the hot gas, which will oppose the gravitational pull that pulls material into the black hole. As the black hole swallows a star, its size will grow. If a black hole 10 times the size of the Sun is absorbing accretion plates at the highest possible speed, in about 1 billion years, the mass of the black hole will be 100 million times that of the Sun.

Niayesh Afshordi

Assistant Professor of Astrophysical Physics at the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Waterloo, lecturer at the Department of Cosmology and Gravity at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics.

I believe the 'speed of darkness' is endless! In classical physics, black space can be simply a vacuum region with nothing. However, quantum mechanics shows us that there is no absolute darkness in space. Even if an area without light allows us to observe it, the magnetic field of a matter particle can appear at any time, even for a single moment. Even gravitational waves, recently discovered panels of space-time vibration, carry these quantum vibrations.

Gravitational wave illustration.

The conundrum is that the gravity of these quantum vibrations is endless. In other words, we have not yet come up with a theory that explains quantum gravity. One of the ways to avoid this problem is if the 'speed of darkness' - that is, quantum vibrations - reaches the infinity in small scale and in a short time.

That is just one possibility, but still the simplest (and my favorite) way to understand big bangs, black holes, dark energy and quantum gravity.