Question

what are some other examples were you have experienced phenomena like seeing lightening before you hear thunder

Answer 1

Seeing something bright before you hear the sound that goes with it is very common — it’s just because light travels ~1,000,000 times faster than sound. A few everyday and interesting examples:

- Fireworks: you see the flash or burst immediately, the boom comes seconds later (delay grows with distance).
- Distant gunfire: the muzzle flash is visible before you hear the crack if the shooter is far away.
- Rocket launches or jet flyovers: you’ll usually see the vehicle before the roar reaches you; for fast/supersonic jets the sonic boom can arrive as a distinct delayed crack.
- Explosions (industrial, demolition, bombs): the flash is seen first, the blast wave arrives later.
- Meteors/bolides: you can see a bright fireball and then, seconds to minutes later (or sometimes not at all), hear a rumble or sonic boom.
- Lightning/“heat lightning”: distant lightning can be visible with no audible thunder because the sound died out or was blocked by terrain/curvature of the Earth.
- Earthquakes (analogy with different wave speeds): P-waves (primary) arrive and are felt before the slower, usually stronger S-waves — you’re sensing the same event in two "modes" that travel at different speeds.
- Astronomy/astrophysics (interesting exceptions): sometimes other messengers arrive in a different order — e.g., gravitational waves or neutrinos detected before the visible light from a neutron-star merger or supernova, depending on how the signals are produced and propagated.

Rule of thumb: count the seconds between the flash and the sound and divide by ~3 to get kilometers (or ~5 to get miles) for the distance to the event.

If you want, tell me an example you’ve seen and I can estimate the distance or explain the physics in more detail.