Light and sound are very different. Sound is a mechanical disturbance that travels through air or another medium. Sound needs a medium to travel through a medium that determines its speed. A thunderstorm is a loud noise that follows a flash of lightning. Lightning can be seen before the sound of thunder is heard as light travels faster than sound. The speed of sound in air is 300m/s while Light travels at 186,282 meters per second. This indicates that the reason why we see lightning first in a thunderstorm is that the visible light waves formed by the plasma in the lightning travel to our eyes much faster than the crack of thunder sound reach to our ears.