Hey Jim Wood, I have known people with your name before but it is a common name. Your interest in light is curious. You seem to enjoy numerology and there are lots of curious conjunctions of numbers. But most of that is probably just coincidence.
Light is one of the first things we could experiment with easily that does not seem to obey Newton?s laws, but has a set of law all it's own. Light belongs to a class called leptons, and most of what we know of matter doesn't seem to apply to these leptons.
For example we cannot seem to find any acceleration with light. It moves though air into a glass prism, and instantly is going slower. It leaves the prism and is instantly going faster. Matter has mass and inertia and can't do that. So far as any experiment that we could think of, light always comes away with no mass and no inertia. It seems to be a loose packet of energy.
If I may expand the definition to a loose packet of energy, we can change the name to a photon, and include energy levels that are above and below the energy levels of visible light. These photons seem to be constantly on the move (that is why the freezing of photons was so interesting, it may not be the photon, but the information that was frozen, discussion still ongoing).
Photons of any energy level all move at the same speed depending on the media they are moving though, but unlike sound waves, they don?t need a media to move in. Photons have a direction vector and a frequency. We use the frequency when we see different colors of light or use FM (frequency modulation) radio, or use an AM tuner. The frequency of the photon determines its energy level. As far as the curious speed of light being 186,xxx miles per second, that is just because of the way we chose the distance of a mile. Had we been more advanced, we could have measured things in terms of a parsec or 3.26 light year, or an Astronomic Unit (AU), the average distance between the earth and the sun.
The exact size of a photon is also a difficult thing to measure due to it?s nature. Think that your microwave can block the microwave photons from getting out of your oven by using a metal grid with holes in it. The photons must in some sense be larger than the holes. Increase the hole size and they can get out. The curious thing is if you leave the door cracked they will get out. They can get out though a very thin crack that is longer than their size. So they seem to be something like a waveform with height but no thickness. Think also of polarized light. Photons with their height oriented with the lenses pass though, but those turned 90 degrees are blocked. Same thing happens in your microwave, not all the energy gets though the crack, only that orientated in the right direction.
As the energy gets higher, the photons can get though smaller holes, but they get adsorbed easier. The ELF (extra low frequency) radio we use to talk to submarines has such a low frequency that it can reach submarines under water. While cosmic rays that have extremely high energy levels are quickly stopped high in the atmosphere though the collision that stops them produces all sorts of other photons (radiation).
This is just an introduction to light, there is much more to it than I could touch on. Try the
http://particleadventure.org/particleadventure/index.html to learn more about matter and energy. It is exciting to learn how things work. Or try
http://www.physorg.com/ to learn about some of the newest research going on in the science world. We have several university professors on this website who can also add their considerable knowledge to the subject.
