[Note – there’s a lot of other stuff I’d been meaning to put here before now, mostly a rehash of things of late. But this particular item pissed me off enough to just put this here instead.]
So we recently had a physics lesson about inertia, and how a moving vehicle cannot stop within 30 feet just because you stepped out in front of it into a crosswalk. Now, it’s time for another one.
We’ll start with the basics. A standard vehicle, manufactured since 1988, is likely capable of speeds up to around 80-90 miles per hour (MPH). Now, some vehicles are more “performance oriented” and capable of speeds higher than that, and others still have been tweaked and tuned to get upwards of 150MPH and more for specialized operations such as racing. That’s pretty fast. 150MPH means you could traverse from the northern tip of New Jersey to the southern tip in about two hours (not accounting for our lovely traffic and highway systems, of course). You could get from Philadelphia to Atlantic City in about 25 minutes. Not bad at all, if you ask me.
Now, for the next part. The speed of light in a vacuum is 670.76 MILLION miles per hour. So it would take the aforementioned car one hour to travel 150 miles, while light could make the trip in about .0008 seconds. That’s 800 microseconds. It took me longer to type this period from the time my brain told my finger to do it: . That’s really fast, and even better than the previous 150MPH.
Now, what is the point of this lesson? Very simple. Light is basically electromagnetic waves. Now waves can be slowed down by other factors, such as the medium through which they travel (note the speed above is light “in a vacuum” – through the atmosphere is slightly slower, and through things like glass and water is slower yet). Radio waves are also in the electromagnetic spectrum, and follow similar rules. This means that, if you try to cut someone off by lagging behind them at a traffic light, and as the light turns green swerve around them into the left-turn-only lane, and fail to pass them, and then proceed to tailgate, swerve, narrowly avoid hitting them, try two times on a winding road to pass in a no-passing zone, and finally pass them anyway on another stretch of road where you continue on to pass 4 other cars (all in a no-passing zone) and almost cause 3 accidents in doing so, your car’s speed still won’t match the speed at which I can relay to the local 911 dispatch that you’re driving like a #&^(ING MORON, tell them your license plate, and watch the kind officer pulling you over about a mile down the road as I stop behind you to relay my witness account to him.
In short, you may be able to outrun me and my car, but you can’t outrun radio waves. Dipshit.