janie's got a gun

c = 299,792,458 meters per second

I think what draws me to astrophysics is the look into the past. When you look up you see the stars twinkling in the night sky. It might be December 7, 2006 when you look up, but that piece of light your seeing has been moving for a million years! It's been moving long before we were walking upright.

So when I read this article, I thought Wow. This event that happened 4 billion light years away also happened 4 billion years ago. We're just now observing it. It's ancient history. By now it's probably all gone but we won't know for another 4 billion years, that's a long term project.

The physics of it all is in our every day lives. It's a 4.2 mile drive from my apartment to work, but what makes it 4.2 miles? How exact is that measurement anyway? What if I'm really driving 4.21 miles? Or if some crackhead did the work in my odometer and I'm really driving 50 miles? Well, it's used to gauge distance, 1 meter is 1/299,792,458 of a second that light travels in a vacuum. When you call your friend with a cell phone there's a 0.01 second or more delay from when you speak and when your friend hears your voice. You can tell when you're both in the same room, that's physics being imposed upon you.