How to Use speed of light in a Sentence

speed of light

noun phrase
Definition of speed of lightnext
  • No – the distance is rate (speed of light) times time (a year).
    — Danya Gainor, CNN, 31 Mar. 2023
  • Jimmy had one gear: moving at the speed of light, even in flip-flops.
    — Brenton Blanchet, Peoplemag, 3 Sep. 2023
  • The stray electrons zip around Jupiter near the speed of light and release radio waves.
    — Shi En Kim, Smithsonian Magazine, 22 May 2024
  • In a world where biology moves at the speed of light, those risks can get out of hand.
    — Michael Specter, STAT, 6 Apr. 2023
  • That’s in quotes because, aside from the speed of light, nothing is faster than this kind of photo shoot.
    — Denise Snodell, Kansas City Star, 10 July 2024
  • Soon the electrons are traveling at nearly the speed of light.
    — Stephanie Pappas, Scientific American, 14 May 2024
  • But there is an unbreakable speed limit, the speed of light, which looks the same to everyone.
    — Jennifer Ouellette and Sean M. Carroll, Ars Technica, 24 Nov. 2023
  • Particles from a solar flare can travel at the speed of light and reach Earth in minutes.
    — John Tufts, The Courier-Journal, 10 May 2024
  • The author of this piece states that the speed of light is sixty-five miles per hour, and fifty-five miles per hour at night or in inclement weather.
    — Ian Frazier, The New Yorker, 6 Nov. 2023
  • Or maybe: Kelsea Ballerini’s boyfriend, Chase Stokes, ran on stage faster than the speed of light and helpfully removed the white frock for her.
    — Hanna Lustig, Glamour, 13 Sep. 2023
  • Modern finance, where money can move around the world with the speed of light, makes the world seem like an increasingly small place.
    — Henry M. Paulson Jr., Foreign Affairs, 26 Jan. 2023
  • But there was another killing energy released by those fires that moved even faster—at the speed of light.
    — John Vaillant, Smithsonian Magazine, 6 June 2023
  • Moving at close to the speed of light, the jet serves as an indicator of a supermassive black hole.
    — Samuel Sanders, Smithsonian Magazine, 13 Sep. 2024
  • Characters fight at the speed of light, jump incredible heights, and more.
    — Rafael Motamayor, Vulture, 4 June 2024
  • Both strike at the speed of light, but while the laser focuses its energy on a small spot, the microwave weapon can emit a broad fan with an area effect.
    — David Hambling, Forbes, 23 Sep. 2024
  • As the camera reaches the speed of light, the accretion disc becomes more distorted as space-time warps.
    — Eric Lagatta, USA TODAY, 7 May 2024
  • And the fact that signals must travel no faster than the speed of light means that now only applies to observers close to one another.
    — Paul M. Sutter, Discover Magazine, 7 July 2023
  • These filaments appear to be composed of huge amounts of cosmic ray electrons moving at close to the speed of light.
    — Matt Hrodey, Discover Magazine, 7 June 2023
  • Another way that SMBHs announce their presence is via jets, narrow beams of ionized gas fired out from the black hole’s poles at close to the speed of light.
    — science.org, 25 Apr. 2023
  • This creates jets of particles that travel at a substantial fraction of the speed of light.
    — John Timmer, Ars Technica, 18 Sep. 2024
  • Traveling at the speed of light, the song took almost 14 minutes to reach its destination.
    — James Factora, Them, 17 July 2024
  • This decay would start in one place and then spread, a spherical bubble growing at the speed of light, transforming the universe.
    — Quanta Magazine, 22 July 2024
  • Particles can move through those substances quicker than that (though not faster than speed of light in a vacuum).
    — Rahul Rao, Popular Science, 29 June 2023
  • Everything, including us, drifts through spacetime and at the speed of light, even though the space bit and the time bit are unevenly distributed.
    — WIRED, 27 Sep. 2023
  • To double the energy of the existing ring, the Tevatron would need to boost particles up to truly absurd speeds, like just a hair below the speed of light.
    — Samia Bouzid, Scientific American, 8 Aug. 2024
  • And since causality determines our sense of the flow of time, here’s another way to look at this: The speed of light is also the speed of time, and therefore the limit to causality.
    — Paul M. Sutter, Discover Magazine, 30 June 2023
  • So in fact, correlations caused by quantum entanglement cannot be used to send signals faster than the speed of light.
    — Juan Maldacena, Scientific American, 1 Nov. 2016
  • At a certain distance, roughly 14 billion light-years away, galaxies appear to be moving away from us faster than the speed of light.
    — Popular Mechanics, 8 Sep. 2023
  • Inside these devices, particles can collide at nearly the speed of light.
    — Sarah Scoles, Scientific American, 19 Aug. 2023
  • But Witherspoon’s team clearly doesn’t play around with this type of thing, once again moving at the speed of light to publicly deny the rumors in a Page Six exclusive.
    — Hanna Lustig, Glamour, 10 Nov. 2023

Some of these examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'speed of light.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.

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