How do you determine the distance of lightening from where you are standing using the sight of lightening and the sound of the thunder?
Asked by: A. Reuvenny
Answer
Light travels at approximately 186,000 miles per second while sound travels at approximately 1100 ft. per second.
Considering the time it takes the light to reach you being negligible (because of such a high speed of light), when you see the lightning flash start counting at a per second rate then when the thunder is heard multiply your count by 1100 and this will give an approximation of the distance in feet from you to the lightning.
Answered by: Joe Thomas
'The strength and weakness of physicists is that we believe in what we can measure. And if we can't measure it, then we say it probably doesn't exist. And that closes us off to an enormous amount of phenomena that we may not be able to measure because they only happened once. For example, the Big Bang. ... That's one reason why they scoffed at higher dimensions for so many years. Now we realize that there's no alternative... '