Some research can be marveling, I don't know where Albert Einstein was heading when making such discoveries. It feels the true scientists lived in the past as many technologies have been built from their foundation. Nevertheless, you must appreciate those who have followed up this theories with constant applications that have produced life changing results. What is the speed of light again? Approximately 299,792,458 (m/s). Isn't this amazing, we are talking of milliseconds travel here. I was making a research to write another article until I met this interesting knowledge that I felt had missed something important. I was a real lover of physics so don't blame me too much if I am astounded. Does the speed of light mean the speed of electricity? Many get it mixed up and we will be doing the necessary dissection.
Considering such amazing speed that is related to light I had to make some possible analysis. How fast can light travel from Africa to Europe? You know we are talking of electromagnetic waves here that is going to be exclusive of vacuum travel. So how far is Africa from Europe? This distance varies depending on the city you want to measure from. Let's say we take London as a measure city from Europe, we will be considering this distance in respect to how light can travel to and fro Lagos. We also look at Cape town and Cairo. I must say many technologies have been built to mimics or even out perform this speed.
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Before going further, we have seen this speed being tried in the telecommunication industries. How fast is the speed of a text message? Of course we will have to consider factors like network congestion, bandwidth, Efficient facilities and even the said type of messaging service. The procedures for delivering a single message is much irrespective of the fact that we get feedback in nanoseconds. It is estimated that on average, SMS gets delivered within 0.1- 0.5 seconds which is equivalent to 100 - 500 m/s. So a text message can travel from Africa to Europe within that said nanoseconds, sounds amazing right? Let's delve into the speed of light.
Considering the flow of light flowing from Nigeria to London, what would you suggest? Seconds wouldn't be bad, even nanoseconds like the text messages. The speed of light considers this very slow. The distance between Lagos and London is estimated to be at around 5056 Km with a possible light travel of 0.017 seconds. Wow! This can also be summarized as 17 milliseconds. I had to also rate the travel from Egypt's City Cairo to Madrid. We are talking of around 3,800 Km here resulting in around 0.013 milliseconds and Cape Town to Lisbon kept it at 0.030 milliseconds. We have to consider how short this travel is, it is something incredible if I must add. Considering if human were able to operate at such level, 24 hours would have seemed like eternity.
speed of light and speed of electricity
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I used to think both meant the same thing. I guess that's what happens when you love exploring for knowledge. What's light? Electromagnetic waves, how about electricity? Simply put, it can be defined as the flow of electrons. Even from the surface we can see a difference here which is in their weights. Electricity can only travel at the speed of light when measured through a vaccum and when this is excluded which is likely due to the method applied to process current we are expected to see delays. Electricity moves through conductors and it speeds can depreciate from the speed of light by 50-90% depending on wires or cables used in transmission. Here is where both conductive properties and signal frequency aids out.
Let take for instance an electric travel in a copper wire and fibre optic cable. Copper is known to be a good conductor of electricity with efficiency around 70-80% in respect to speed of light travel. What this means is that copper wire are likely to delay by 20-30% when measuring against electromagnetic waves travel. Fibre optic gets even more delays; we are talking of 60-70% here. This shows a 30-40% delay against the speed of light. I was happy to learn this and even happier to share it. When I said their difference lies in weight I was considering the interaction electric flow has with material which causes some rigidity although in nanoseconds seconds. So in a nutshell, we can say speed of light is approximately 299,792,45 m/s light travel through a vaccum whereas the speed of electricity is some percentage delay (around 50-90%) of speed of light due to presence of electrons.
To conclude, let me add, it wonderful to see how this terminologies plays how in our daily living. It has brought about ground breaking technologies. Maybe you've not been considering it, but a lot of security application like surveillance and emergency response systems comes from here. It has been widely applied in the medical sectors; talk of telemedicine, laser surgery and optical imaging. Adding to that, communication, transportation, agriculture are still full time beneficiaries. It's amazing how energy and inventions spread to diverse sectors in order to aid human living.