Please help

[primortial c]

HEY guys I am stumped could someone please tell me how long it takes light to travel 1 foot and 2 feet I know its in the millionths of a second but I cannot figure it out I must have the IQ of a penny thanks in advance...

[insane_alien]

time=distance/speed.

 

thats all you need to work it out. you know the distance and you know the speed.

[primortial c]

IM sorry I cant do it

[insane_alien]

what? you can't do division? or is it unit conversion thats getting you?

[primortial c]

ok light travels 983,571,056,160 feet in one second so 1 foot would be 983,571,056,159 TH/ of a second. but I cannot figure out 2 feet for the life of me

 

do I just subtract 1 more

[insane_alien]

just put a 2 in that little equation i gave you and out will pop your answer. just like that.

[primortial c]

still no go Im only 11 years old could you simplify it for me

[insane_alien]

okay, equations are really useful tools in physics, maths, chemistry, well just about every where. they work because things tend to have basic mathematical relations to each other.

 

they are composed of variables and operators. in our case we have the variables, speed, time and distance. and the only operator is a division.

 

the time is takes you to travel a certain distance is the total distance you have to travel, divided by the distance you travel per second. makes sense.

 

so, we can construct the equation time=distance/speed

 

this equation will work for any distance and or speed you want. all you have to do is keep the units consistent. if your distance is measured in feet and your time in seconds your speed would need to be in feet per second. using something obscure like furlongs per fortnight would give the wrong answer.

 

you have a distance(2 feet) and a speed(983,571,056,159 feet per second) so,

 

the distance variable is equal to 2(that means instead of writing 'distance' you can just write 2 and do the same thing with speed.

 

so you would end up with time= 2/983,571,056,159 and the answer will be in seconds.

[primortial c]

ok so 983,571,056,159 divided into 2 = 491,785,528,079.5 TH of a second to travel 2 feet I got that before and it just does not look right why would it be cut in half just by 1 more foot dont get me wrong I am not arguing with you I guess I will just go with that answer thank you...

[swansont]

The shorter way to say what insane_alien was telling you is "multiply it by 2"

 

It takes a certain amount of time to go 1 foot. To go 2 feet, it takes twice as long.

 

ok light travels 983,571,056,160 feet in one second so 1 foot would be 983,571,056,159 TH/ of a second. but I cannot figure out 2 feet for the life of me

 

Actually, that should be 983,571,056.16 That's a really big number — almost a billion. So 1 foot takes about a billionth of a second. 2 feet takes 2 billionths of a second. It gets a little tiring to keep saying "billionth of a second" so people have come up with a shorthand: nano. It means a billionth. So it takes light a nanosecond to go a foot. 2 nanoseconds to go 2 feet.

[primortial c]

My dad just told me that 2 billionths of a second is less time than 1 billionth of a second and he said that the time to travel the 2 ND foot would not be less than the time it took to travel the first foot he said just to subtract 1 for each foot from the total feet that light travels in one second he said its just that easy and then I would have my millionths of a second he is no physics major by no means but he seems confident on this one OMG I give up..

[insane_alien]

obviously he is no physics major if he thinks 2 billionths is lower than 1 billionth.

 

if i have 0.000000001(a billionth) and i multiply it by 2 i get 0.000000002(2 billionths).

 

i don't know what he means by 'subtract one' that would give -999,999,999,999 billlionths of a second to go 2 feet. which seems dodgy if light starts going back in time after a foot.

[Mr Skeptic]

One 2 billionth is smaller than 1 billionth, but two 1 billionths is larger than 1 billionth.

[primortial c]

I think I got it thank you so much extra credit you know and my dad is a moron

[iNow]

I think I got it thank you so much extra credit you know and my dad is a moron

 

That's not nice at all. I'm not a betting man, but I'd wager a fair sum of money that you didn't accurately understand what he was trying to share with you.

 

 

This is basically what everyone is saying:

 

[math]0.0 \;\;<\;\; \frac{1}{2,000,000,000} \;\;<\;\; \frac{1}{1,000,000,000} \;\;<\;\; \frac{2}{1,000,000,000} \;\;<\;\; 1.0 [/math]

[swansont]

That's not nice at all. I'm not a betting man, but I'd wager a fair sum of money that you didn't accurately understand what he was trying to share with you.

 

Yeah. Don't attribute to stupidity that which can be attributed to miscommunication. (The latter happens a lot.)