Quick Light (Tez Roshni)
How
quickly time flies! They say it travels at the speed of light.
I
am reminded of the good man, Olaus Romer, an Earthling who was born 372 years
ago and died 306 years ago.
One
balmy afternoon, when a weak sun was shining its light down and a light breeze
was playing about, our friend, as the story goes, was lying under his favourite
tree contemplating life. There were no apples hanging from the tree as it happened
to be a jackfruit tree. He was fortunate that no jackfruit fell on his head, or
else there would have been no telling what the gravity of the situation might
have been, and the good man escaped by the skin of his teeth. Ah!
Just
when he had begun to doze off and the opening credits of his day-dream began to
roll, he was startled into wakefulness by a call from his favourite aunt on his
smart phone. She asked him what he was doing and he replied somewhat testily, for he was forced to pause the dream, “Contemplating Life”. And Aunt Matilda,
who was a little hard of hearing, misheard him and said, “What are you
contemplating light for? Don’t just lie there and contemplate light. Do
something about it. Light! Pah, bah and tchah!”
And Olaus was always in mortal fear of his Aunt Matilda for she was the one who,
when he was a boy of four, scared him by switching off the light without
warning during story telling sessions when she spoke of spooks and things that
move in the dark. He always wished that he would be able to catch a fistful of
light and keep it in his pocket so that he would never be in the dark. But, try
as he might, he could not. It always managed to slip through and was too quick
for him. Hah!
He
decided to find out just how quick light was.
Now,
he was familiar with the planet Jupiter in the sky. Among its sixty seven moons
was one called Io (pronounced “Ayyo”, and rightly so). Io had a habit of
playing hide-and-seek with Jupiter, going off every now and then into its shadow. Olaus
started off by timing the eclipse when Io suddenly
moved into the shadow of Jupiter and again when it suddenly moved out of it. Don’t
ask me how, but with the help of a stop watch and by a clever mix of
observation, logic, mathematics, trigonometry, some intrepid calculations on
the fingers of his hand and remembering the carry-forwards in his head, he was
able to derive a figure, rounded off to a hundred and forty thousand miles per second, as the
speed of light. This was later discovered by other clever mixers to be off the
mark by a slight margin of some forty-six-thousand-odd miles per second but it
was close enough for everyone to pat him on the back during their next Friday club
get-together. Wah!
(One
intense trignomerist, or whatever you call those astronomers who use trigonometry
to bring them up to speed, patted him a little too hard, causing him to
exclaim, “Io”!)
It
is already three hundred and forty years since Olaus was thus patted on his
back. Since then, other noteworthies have sat down singly and jointly, gallons
of coffee* at hand to keep them awake, and have calculated the speed of light to
a nicety. And the conclusion they reached was that light travelled too fast. At
the rate of two hundred ninety nine million, seven hundred ninety two thousand,
four hundred fifty eight metres every second, to be precise! That’s mighty
quick.
Sudden,
what?
* I wonder if the coffee they had was the South Indian filter variety, strong, sakkare kadimeˊ !
* I wonder if the coffee they had was the South Indian filter variety, strong, sakkare kadimeˊ !
© - Shiva Kumar – 07
Dec 2016
