Look in any physics textbook and the speed of light will be listed: approximately 300,000,000 meters per second. That’s a big number, but what exactly does it mean?
Well, to put things in perspective, let’s examine a series of hypothetical situations in which you can run at the speed of light.
Monday morning and you overslept? You should try running to school. Assuming you live 10 miles away, you’d get there in .00005 seconds. Before anyone even had time to blink.
You could be the new marathon running phenom. It would take you slightly longer to run the Boston Marathon than it would to get to school, about .0001 seconds. You could watch the whole thing right after you finished; I’m sure it would be a close race for second place. Actually, you could run the Boston Marathon over 52 million times in a row, one right after the other, and you would still finish before the fastest marathon runner finished his first.
After the marathon, you run over to a drag car race. Instead of merely watching, you decide that you want to join the action, so you run down to the track. The drag car you want to race can go a max speed of about 200 mph (89 m/s). Obviously this isn’t a fair race, so you give the car a head start. On a track of 400 m, you give it a 399.9999 m head start. Meaning it is already at max speed, and it has to go 1/10 of a millimeter in order to cross the finish line. Assuming your acceleration is instantaneous, you would still beat the drag car. You would cover the 400 m faster than the 200 mph drag car can cover a distance equivalent to the thickness of a single strand of hair.
You decide that drag racing is too easy…so you find something a bit more dangerous: guns. You could catch a bullet – that you shot. The fastest bullets can reach speeds of 4000 feet per second (1219 m/s). You’re getting a little more of a challenge than you did with the drag car (the bullet is over 10 times faster), but not much compared to your total speed. Again, assuming your acceleration is instantaneous, you’d catch up with the bullet basically instantaneously, and in order to keep up, you would only have to go .0004% of your max speed.
By now, you’re getting bored of racing things; you’re the fastest blur in the universe (well, you and light). Feeling down, you decide to go for a little run. You could run around the Earth 7.5 times in one second (assuming you could run across water – but then again at the speed of light, your feet probably wouldn’t break the surface tension of water). So it’s a short run, but you at least you got the opportunity to see all the major attractions across the different continents.
Lastly, and most importantly, you could impress all your friends.
One final note: when you’re traveling at the speed of light, don’t run into anything. Sprinter Usain Bolt’s top speed is 27.78 miles per hour (12.42 m/s). Imagine if he ran into you without slowing down. You might get a few bruises, but no permanent harm. Now let’s say you run into somebody while running over 24 million times faster, at 300,000,000 m/s.
KA-BOOM. That’s an explosion you can’t run away from.
