I’m sure many of you remember the vivid scene from the movies showing the lighting of the Beacons as they stretched from Gondor to Rohan.

I always took that scene with a pretty big grain of salt and just assumed they took a few liberties with reality to make something that looked cool but kept to the general concept.  However, this post from an Associate Physics Professor was mentioned on the official forums and I couldn’t help re-posting it.  He goes into incredible detail about the speed at which things could really happen as well as how fast they would be moving to match the movie clips.  He does note that the books pretty much gloss over this whole concept and I’ll admit I was always curious how something like that would work.  He proceeds to the do some real-world testing and extrapolation to what it would take to send a similar signal down the East Coast of the US.

A fun read and certainly one that goes to show that no matter how much you think you know about something there’s always someone looking to go one step further 🙂

I will be curious to see if and how they do something like this in LOTRO.