CC Sunscreens has been in the business of helping Arizonans live more comfortably since 1992. We are proud to be a family-run, locally-owned business. All of our employees are committed to honesty, service, and integrity to our neighbors here in the Valley of the Sun. We serve the entire Phoenix metropolitan area and beyond from Queencreek, Sun City, Buckeye, to Cave Creek and all the surrounding areas.

How Fast Does Light Go?

Light travels extremely fast: in fact, Einstein theorized that no matter can travel beyond the speed of light which clocks in at an astounding 670,616,629 mph. If that’s hard to picture, let’s try breaking it down in more localized terms. The circumference of the Earth is approximately 24,900 miles and something traveling at the speed of light would be able to travel that circumference 7 and a half times in the span of just one second.

Want to think about it even more locally? Traveling at the speed of light you could travel the distance from San Diego to Boston (about 3000 miles) 62 times over in a single second – or make 31 round trips! For an even more local way to envision the speed of light, if we set out from Phoenix, Arizona, we could travel to Las Vegas, Nevada and back over 310 times in a single second moving at light speed!

Theorized by Albert Einstein, the speed of light is thought to be a constant regardless of the speed it is observed at and nothing can move faster than light, making it a galactic-style speed limit. In current models of the universe however, it is thought that some measurements of relative speeds can surpass the speed of light, in particular, the relative speed at which the universe is expanding.

Figuring the Speed of Light

Discovering how fast light travels has taken centuries of human thought and deduction. Initially it was even a matter of scientific debate as to whether light could possess a speed or if it traveled instantaneously. Debated since ancient times, many scientific minds put observational work and experimentation into discerning whether light moved instantaneously or had near instantaneous speed.

A breakthrough in calculating the speed of light occurred in the late 1600 when Ole Römer compared observed movements of Jupiter’s moon Io to his predictive calculations of its movement. He accounted for discrepancies between the timing he predicted and the movement he observed as being caused by a lag produced by the time it takes light to reach Earth from Io.

From the mid- to late 1800s the measurement of the speed of light was refined to within 1% of what we know it to be today. Using systems of lights and mirrors, Hippolyte Fizou and Leon Foucault worked in France to measure light speed. In the U.S. during the late 1800s Albert Michelson refined measurement techniques to further understand light speed, winning a Nobel Prize for his work.

Light Speed versus Light Years

Though a major trope of science fiction and fantasy, we aren’t remotely close to being able to travel in space at or beyond light speed. Light travels so fast, it is used as the basis for a distance measurement, the somewhat misleading “light year”. Rather than be a measurement of time, a light year represents the distance light can travel in the span of an Earth year – around six trillion miles.

Light years are useful for helping us conceptualize the vast distances of space. In our home solar system, the Earth’s moon rests a mere light-second away from us, and we orbit the Sun about 8 light-minutes away from its surface. We only start to see light on the scale of light years away when we search the night sky for stars beyond our solar system.

CC Sunscreens

Light is fascinating, but there certainly can be too much of a good thing. That’s where CC Sunscreens comes in. We offer a wide array of stylish sun protection for your home with a selection of sunscreens that preserve natural comfort while lowering your energy expenses. There’s no time like now to start cutting your energy bill with attractive, lasting sun protection from CC Sunscreens.