Ah, the fast-paced life of a theoretical physicist! I just got done giving a one-hour talk in Rome, given at a workshop for experts on the ATLAS experiment, one of the two general purpose experiments at the Large Hadron Collider [LHC]. Tomorrow morning I’ll be talking with a colleague at the Rutherford Appleton Lab in the U.K., an expert from CMS (the other general purpose experiment at the LHC). Then it’s off to San Francisco, where tomorrow (Wednesday, 5 p.m. Pacific Time, 8 p.m. Eastern), at the Exploratorium, I’ll be joined by Caltech’s Sean Carroll, who is an expert on cosmology and particle physics and whose book on the Higgs boson discovery just won a nice prize, and we’ll be discussing science with science writer Alan Boyle, as we did back in February. [You can click here to listen in to Wednesday’s event.] Next, on Thursday I’ll be at a meeting hosted in Stony Brook, on Long Island in New York State, discussing a Higgs-particle-related scientific project with theoretical physics colleagues as far flung as Hong Kong. On Friday I shall rest.
“How does he do it?”, you ask. Hey, a private jet is a wonderful thing! Simple, convenient, no waiting at the gate; I highly recommend it! However — I don’t own one. All I have is Skype, and other Skype-like software. My words will cross the globe, but my body won’t be going anywhere this week.
We should not take this kind of communication for granted! If the speed of light were 186,000 miles (300,000 kilometers) per hour, instead of 186,000 miles (300,000 kilometers) per second, ordinary life wouldn’t obviously change that much, but we simply couldn’t communicate internationally the way we do. It’s 4100 miles (6500 kilometers) across the earth’s surface to Rome; light takes about 0.02 seconds to travel that distance, so that’s the fastest anything can travel to make the trip. But if light traveled 186,000 miles per hour, then it would take over a minute for my words to reach Rome, making conversation completely impossible. A back-and-forth conversation would be difficult even between New York and Boston — for any signal to travel the 200 miles (300 kilometers) would require four seconds, so you’d be waiting for 8 seconds to hear the other person answer your questions. We’d have similar problems — slightly less severe — if the earth were as large as the sun. And someday, as we populate the solar system, we’ll actually have this problem.
So think about that next time you call or Skype or otherwise contact a distant friend or colleague, and you have a conversation just as though you were next door, despite your being separated half-way round the planet. It’s a small world (and a fast one) after all.