Galileo

Light normally travels in straight lines, but with some clever pre-adjustment, it curves instead.

Let us first consider the law of rectilinear propagation. The earliest surviving optical treatise, Euclid’s Catoptrics1 (280BC), recognized that light travels in straight-lines in homogeneous media.

The speed of sound through air is about 340 meters per second. It’s faster through water, and it’s even faster through steel. Light will travel through a vacuum at 300 million meters per second. No information can propagate faster than the speed of light.

The speed of light in a vacuum is 186,282 miles per second (299,792 kilometers per second), and in theory nothing can travel faster than light. In miles per hour, light speed is, well, a lot: about mph. If you could travel at the speed of light, you could go around the Earth 7.5 times in one second.

miles per hour

The announcement he had made promised to overturn our understanding of the Universe. If the data gathered by 160 scientists working on the OPERA project were correct, the unthinkable had been observed. Particles – in this case, neutrinos – had travelled faster than light.

Scientists at NEC Corporation’s (NEC) basic research unit in the US claim to have proven that light can travel faster than its acknowledged speed in vacuum in a successful experiment in superluminal light propagation.

Keep on accelerating, and the car will reach its staggering top speed of 403km/h (250mph) – higher than any car we’ve ever created.

300

The Flash is faster than Sonic. Sonic the hedgehog runs at the speed of sound. While the Flash can run so fast he can jump through time.

In terms of pure speed, in their respective universes, the Flash (Barry Allen) is faster, by far, than Quicksilver. Quicksilver has been seen at a top speed of four or five times the speed of sound (Mach 4 or 5). This level of speed for Quicksilver is new.