To understand the speed of light is not as simple as it might seem
It travels so fast it seems to be happening in an illusory dream
Turn on a laser and bend its beam to circle our globe’s entire girth
In a single second it would travel eight times around the earth
To understand the scale of things is also extremely hard to do
The difference between a million and billion? Most don’t have a clue.
If you spent a thousand dollars a day from the time of Christ’s birth
Baby Jesus would be almost three for a million dollars’ worth
But if you spent a thousand dollars a day and spent a billion dollars gold
Jesus would be nearly three thousand years in age, and that is old
To combine scale and light can help us understand our world just a little bit better
For instance, how long does it take light to travel the length of an eight by ten-inch letter
It takes slightly less than a nanosecond for this distance to be consumed
For that is one billionth of a second which is awfully damn tiny or so I presume
But if I want go to the tiniest measurement of time that has ever been conceived
I would need to measure a yoctosecond or one septillionth of a second and I believe
This is the time it takes light to travel the width of the nucleus of a single atom
Now that is to me one of the most obscure and senseless pieces of pure datum