I have never figured this out either and the first time I worked out how slow light actually travels was kind of an epiphany.

It’s not that it’s slow – it’s that we’re taught from a very young age to accept it as instantaneous. It’s so fast, we don’t have to make allowances for it. It takes time to get between planets? That’s fine. Planets are a long way away from each other. My brain can accept that.

But then something strange happened.

Computers.

Computers are really fast. Really, really fast. Still, not fast enough, because mine takes forever to do some stuff, and maybe I should upgrade it, but we’re talking billions of calculations a second.

And in the time a modern computer can do a calculation, light can only crawl about 6 centimeters. That’s two inches, or thereabouts. What? A computer can take two numbers and multiply them and give you the answer in the time it takes light to crawl just 6 centimeters? What gives?

In truth, it wouldn’t be such a problem for us if there was stuff faster than light – something that could go, I don’t know, several meters in the time that a desktop computer can make a mockery of it. The thing is that’s how fast it goes. It’s slow. It’s not even a lot of digits – and digits in mathematics can make even the universe look small – heck, we can even assign a number to the atoms in the universe – but that’s a big number and the speed of light isn’t.

So while I can’t tell you what makes light as slow as it is, I hear you brother. Anyone who has had to make allowances so that slow-light-speed photons can make their way across the experiment hears you. Light is slow.

Or maybe our concepts of speed have just changed a lot in the last hundred years. Light hasn’t gotten any slower. Maybe it’s our imagination that has gotten faster.