(August 24, 2018 at 3:31 am)vulcanlogician Wrote: Doesn't this seem counterintuitive? It seems like it should only take eight minutes to see the sun go out because the other end of the stick would only have to travel a few centimeters. But that is not the case.
I think the problem is that you are thinking of it in discrete steps. As in push on stick, light goes off. Whereas in reality there would be pressure applied to one end of the stick which then tries to equalise and moves the position of the atoms in space along the stick until it reaches the light switch. Or something like that, I am not a physicist. Maybe it's easier to think of it instead as an electrical signal sent over a wire to the light switch at the sun rather than a stick. The electrons would then take 8 minutes to move along it before the sun could be turned off.
