I don’t recall exactly when it was that I learned that it took a bit more than eight minutes for the sun’s light to reach us here on Earth. Sometime before high school, I think. Anyway, that pedestrian fact made a deep impression on me. I knew that light traveled at a fixed speed and that its operation wasn’t (quite) instantaneous, although in our quotidian lives, it seemed almost so.
But the fact that the sunlight we see all about us is eight minutes old made a deep and disconcerting impression on my young self. Who knows what might have happened to the Sun in the meantime?
Read Full Article: https://amgreatness.com/2026/06/21/the-solstice-of-our-discontent/
