Speed of Light

Getting my mind around something unfamiliar is a challenge.  To think, for instance, the accepted notion that light moves at 186,000 miles a second is staggering.  Compound that with multiplying seconds into years; (it's 3,153,600 seconds in a year by the way, and heck, that's five trillion, eight hundred and seventy-two billion, three million miles a year ~ there I did the arithmetic.) But then to say light moving at that alarming speed would take hundreds, even thousands of years to reach objects we're told have this much girth or is made up of these kinds of elements is just dubious to my mind-that-needs-comparisons. 

My wife is suspicious of things like that as well, because she doesn't have a reference point either.

   "OK, I can believe in prehistoric times because they have dug up bones, but history?  I don't trust people who wrote it." Fair enough, I agree.  Historians are supported by bill payers who have agenda's. Just as painters in the Renaissance painted religious paintings because the patrons who had the coin to cover bread and wine bills happen to be the church.  I digress.

  I did my research to demonstrate to my bride the soundness in accepting the conventional wisdom on the speed of light.  Turns out we're still in the approximate value department when discussing the absolute speed. (as in vacuum speed versus speed through glass, these variables matter.) So there's wiggle room in the discussion about what we accept as the stated speed of light.

  That's something that struck my speculation.  Our demanding exactness in a world devoid of absolutes.  For my wife, she's learned to be skeptical over things lauded as 'absolute fact'.  I salute that disposition because I too have been hoodwinked by populace dogma.

I'm reminded of a scene from the 1997 movie Men in Black where Agent Kay, Played by Tommy Lee Jones, is recruiting James Darrell Edwards III, who is played by Will Smith. Edwards asked why didn't they just tell people the truth, people are smart, they'll understand when told aliens existed on the planet.  Agent Kay made a profound response that I keep near ever since hearing it.

   "A person is smart. People are dumb.  Everything they've ever Known has been proven to be wrong.  A thousand year ago every-body knew as a fact, that the earth was the center of the universe.  Five hundred years ago, they just knew for a fact that it was flat.  Fifteen minutes ago, you knew we humans were alone in the universe.  Imagine what you'll know tomorrow"

 So yes, I may be stretching to challenge a well accepted obscure mentioning of light moving at a given speed.  I mean, what's the big deal if that's wrong anyway?  What my caution consist of is my automatic surrender to proclamations I have no tools to test if they are accurate or not; that is what is alarming for me.  As a practice I mean. Sure, I know proclamations can be true or false, but I believe it is best I stay clear on which one is which.  Perhaps as in the MIB movie where Edwards asks when told he had until sun-up to decide to leave everything he ever knew behind; where no one would ever know he ever existed.

   "Is it worth it?"

Kay replied, "You find out, you let me know"

I should open up to the possibility that what I swear is the way things are, could be just place holders for the way things actually are.