Speed of light can only travel a maximum of about in a single cycle. Processors must therefore be placed close to each other to minimize communication latencies; this can cause difficulty with cooling. If clock frequencies continue to increase, the speed of light will eventually become a limiting factor for the internal design of single chips. Given that the equatorial circumference of the Earth is about and that "c" is about , the theoretical shortest time for a piece of information to travel half the globe along the surface is about 67 milliseconds. When light is travelling around the globe in an optical
Speed of light which all massless particles and changes of the associated fields travel in vacuum (including electromagnetic radiation and gravitational waves). Such particles and waves travel at regardless of the motion of the source or the inertial reference frame of the observer. In the special and general theories of relativity, interrelates space and time, and also appears in the famous equation of mass–energy equivalence . The speed at which light propagates through transparent materials, such as glass or air, is less than ; similarly, the speed of electromagnetic waves in wire cables is slower than . The ratio between and the speed