Untitled Work

It had been about a year and a half since he’d left home to go to college. It had been even longer since he’d actually gazed up at the nighttime sky to look at the stars. The sight of them caught him off guard. There were more than he’d remembered: a literal plethora of white-blue twinkling with the possibility of hope and the importance of grandeur. He wondered, <i>how long did it take for the light from these stars to reach me?</i>
He took a couple of steps back along the pavement so as to get a better look at them. Turning around, he was blinded by the harsh piss-yellow luminescence glowering down from a light pole. Agitated, he wondered, <i>how long did it take for that light to reach me? </i>He immediately began to work on the math.
Now, the speed of light is approximately 300 million miles per second. Or is it 300 million meters per second? Well, I know it takes the light from the sun about 9 minutes to reach Earth, so that would mean… yeah, it’s gotta be 300 million meters per second. Okay, so the distance from the light pole to me is about two meters, maybe one and a half; I’ll just say two. Alright, so how long does it take light to travel two meters… two meters is one-hundred-and-fifty-million times as small as 300 million… so it took about one-hundred-and-fifty-millionths of a second for that light to reach me.
Now how many milliseconds would that be? Take away two zeros, and you get… one-and-a-half-millionth of a millisecond? Now, nanoseconds… take away seven more zeros… too few zeros… you’d get like six nanoseconds.
Wow, six nanoseconds. Crazy.
All the time he’d been computing numbers in his head, he’d also been walking briskly along the sidewalk. The calculations done, his legs continued to carry him along, while his mind continued to wander onto new topics, and the lights from the pole and the heavens continued to follow (illuminate down upon) him.