Interesting facts (19/365)
A nanosecond light is a unit of distance, although with a particularity: it uses a very small unit of time (the nanosecond) multiplied by a very large velocity in human terms (that of light). In this sense it is similar to the light year, but since instead of a year it measures only the distance that light travels in a nanosecond vacuum (one billionth of a second) it stays at approximately 30 centimeters (more precisely, 29.9792458 cm), which coincidentally is also more or less an foot (30.48 cm) or the length of a DIN A4 paper sheet (29.70 cm).
Another curiosity about this strange unit of measure is that its popularizer was the beloved Grace Murray Hopper, inventor of the Cobol programming language. In her talks and lectures, she used to show a thread, a nanosecond light in length, so that attendees could get an idea of the distance that electricity could travel at that time, compared to the microseconds light (a thread a thousand times more long) or light picoseconds (thousand times smaller: 0.3 mm, like a peppercorn.
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