Name: What If the Speed of Light and Sound Were Switched?
Uploaded: 2020-04-04T08:07:23.000Z
Duration: 4 min 28 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Modal verbs - A2

Past simple

But what if we switched the rules a little?

The comparative

Imagine a world, where the speed of light was slower -

In turn, the sound in that hypothetical world

if the speed of light and sound switched.

Light travels at a constant speed of 300,000 km/s (186,000 mi/s).

If you, personally, were able to travel at that kind of speed,

you could zip around the Earth's equator 7.5 times

well, we'll get to that part in a moment.

There's one big difference between the speed of light

It's always the same - for every observer.

The speed of sound depends on the density of the medium it travels through.

What we usually refer to as the speed of sound

is the speed of sound waves passing through dry air at 20 °C (68 °F).

And that's almost a million times slower than the speed of light.

how different would our Universe have turned out to be?

Since light speed is a universal speed limit,

changing it would completely change how the Universe works.

With the new speed limit of 343 m/s (1125 ft/s),

You'd find that moving at 0.2 km/h (0.12 mi/h)

as you wouldn't be able to see far ahead.

But you would experience a cool Doppler effect around you.

Things in front of your car would seem blue.

In your rear-view mirror, everything would look red.

In that world, it would take hours to send a message

to someone on the other side of the planet.

You know what would be even more annoying?

Talking to someone who's further than a hand's distance from you.

as if you were video calling someone with a bad signal,

We would never be able to make it to space.

Because to do that, we'd need to escape from the gravitational influence of Earth.

That requires the speed greater than the speed of light

not even the International Space Station.

the chemical reactions in your body would slow down.

Essential functions, like your metabolism, depend on those reactions.

I can't tell you exactly how this would end,

All that and we haven't even got to the speed of sound yet.

let's say your body adjusted to the slow motion inside it.

so you would hear everything before you got to see it.

Not a single living organism would survive under such strong pressure.

Not to mention that all this breaks the rules of physics.

Nothing can exceed the universal speed limit.

long before we got to experience that cool Doppler effect.

Next time, try increasing the speed of light instead of decreasing it.

Subtitles ListPlay Video

What If the Speed of Light and Sound Were Switched?

incredibly

essential

metabolism

constant