Light is the fastest thing you can use for telecommunication, but it’s too fast for computers to catch and process. Researchers from the University of Sydney have successfully managed to slow down light waves to turn them into sound waves on a computer chip.

Sound does not travel at all in space. The vacuum of outer space has essentially zero air. Because sound is just vibrating air, space has no air to vibrate and therefore no sound. Radio is a form of electromagnetic radiation just like light and can therefore travel through the vacuum of space just fine.

Sound travels by vibrating the particles in the medium so that they bump into each other. In the vacuum of space, there are no (or very, very few) particles to vibrate, so sound cannot travel through this medium.

Noise (sound) energy can be converted into viable source of electric power by using a suitable transducer. The vibrations created by noise can be converted into electrical energy through the principle of electromagnetic induction.

Light and sound are not on the same spectrum. Light belongs to the electromagnetic spectrum but sound does not. Sound however, is a longitudinal wave – a wave that vibrates in the direction that it is travelling. Sound requires a medium to travel through whereas electromagnetic waves like visible light do not.

We can store cold (ice), heat (i.e. hot water bag) and electrical charge (batteries). We can even “store” a magnetic field in a magnet. We can convert light into energy and then, if we want, back to light. But we can’t store light in form of light in significant amounts.

Can light be stored in a container? Yes indeed. In fact there is a branch of science called Fiber optics which exploits this phenomenon associated with light. The technical term for this is Total Internal Reflection.

At the moment of collision, a photon no longer exists. Everything we know about light, is deduced by detecting these collisions. Light itself is undetectable. It neither emits, nor reflects anything which would allow us to detect it.

Potential energy Chemical energy is energy stored in the bonds of atoms and molecules. Batteries, biomass, petroleum, natural gas, and coal are examples of chemical energy. Gravitational energy is energy stored in an object’s height. The higher and heavier the object, the more gravitational energy is stored.