Here's something rather interesting about the sun, and stars in general, in regard to light. A single photon (a particle of light) takes about 8 minutes and nineteen seconds to travel from the surface of the sun to the surface of the Earth. The photon, is, of course, traveling at the speed of light through space, and the earth is about 8.3 light-seconds away from the sun (and light travels at a staggering 670,600,000 miles per hour). However, after that photon is created at the center of the sun as a result of fusion at the sun's core, it takes somewhere between one hundred thousand to ten million years to make it to the sun's surface.

Time is a funny thing. It's passage may seem constant, but it totally isn't. And I'm not just talking about how boring or tedious days drag by. See, this pretty obscure physicist by the name of Albert Einstein managed to codify a new area of physics back in the early 1900's which we call Special Relativity. He was the main reason the idea of the luminiferous aether (which I talked about in my post on Light) was discarded, because it showed the speed of light to be an absolute, universal constant, regardless of reference frame. Which is cool and all, but what does light have to do with time?

Light is maybe one of the more important things in the universe (though this is debateable—some sensible people rank chocolate above it). It also has a rich history of people not really knowing what it was, how fast it moves, or even how it moves. So, in order to better understand it, let's turn back time, and cover a bit of light history (these puns never get old).

For a very long time, people believed light to be instantaneous, and for good reason. When is the last time you could see light move from place to place? Some folks disagreed, including a man born on February 15th in 1564 by the name of Galileo Galilei. Galileo attempted to measure the speed of light much like one might measure the speed of sound. In fact, you and another person could get a rudimentary measurement of the speed of sound using this method, so let's cover the sound applications first:

If you haven't played any of the Mass Effect games, you really should. However, sometimes the physics of the very wonderfully developed fictitious future galaxy doesn't quite hold up. In this case, the very effect they've named the games after. Now, I'm not going to discuss Element Zero or the idea of manipulating mass (which is the titular Mass Effect), but rather how this manipulation doesn't make possible many of the things they claim it does. But first, let's start with a primer for those of you whop haven't played the games, or didn't pay a whole lot of attention to the sciency stuff in them:

Every object* that is above 0 Kelvin (read: everything in the universe) radiates somewhere on the electromagnetic spectrum. Stick with me, and I'll explain why. But first, every object* also absorbs light somewhere along the electromagnetic spectrum. For example, let's take glass. Now, in the visible spectrum (390<λ<700 nm), glass doesn't really absorb, reflect, or emit light (which is why it's transparent). This is due to a quantum mechanics phenomenon called "quantization." Essentially, electrons and the like can only exist in discrete levels of energy, and nowhere in between (like steps on a staircase—you can be on one step or another, but not between them (at least not without falling)). This is odd, and somewhat counter-intuitive because it doesn't appear to occur at the macroscopic level (our daily lives), but it's completely true (as far as we know). When an object absorbs light, it's because that specific wavelength of light is enough to jump an electron...