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Speed of Light

The speed of light in vacuum is exactly 299,792,458 meters per second. Many scientists throughout history have attempted to measure the speed of light through different experiments. In 1676, Ole Rømer observed the motions of Jupiter and calculated that light takes about 22 minutes to traverse the diameter of Earth's orbit, though his measurement was not fully accurate due to the orbital distance being unknown at the time. A more accurate measurement was done by Hippolyte Fizeau in 1849, who calculated the speed of light to be 313,000,000 meters per second. Modern experiments, including those done by Michelson, have refined this measurement to the now standard speed of 299,796,000 meters per second.

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64 views

Speed of Light

The speed of light in vacuum is exactly 299,792,458 meters per second. Many scientists throughout history have attempted to measure the speed of light through different experiments. In 1676, Ole Rømer observed the motions of Jupiter and calculated that light takes about 22 minutes to traverse the diameter of Earth's orbit, though his measurement was not fully accurate due to the orbital distance being unknown at the time. A more accurate measurement was done by Hippolyte Fizeau in 1849, who calculated the speed of light to be 313,000,000 meters per second. Modern experiments, including those done by Michelson, have refined this measurement to the now standard speed of 299,796,000 meters per second.

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Ninggen Hooman
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© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Speed of light

Main article: Speed of light

Beam of sun light inside the cavity of Rocca ill'Abissu


at Fondachelli-Fantina, Sicily
The speed of light in vacuum is defined to be exactly 299 792 458 m/s (approx. 186,282 miles per
second). The fixed value of the speed of light in SI units results from the fact that the metre is now
defined in terms of the speed of light. All forms of electromagnetic radiation move at exactly this
same speed in vacuum.
Different physicists have attempted to measure the speed of light throughout
history. Galileo attempted to measure the speed of light in the seventeenth century. An early
experiment to measure the speed of light was conducted by Ole Rømer, a Danish physicist, in 1676.
Using a telescope, Rømer observed the motions of Jupiter and one of its moons, Io. Noting
discrepancies in the apparent period of Io's orbit, he calculated that light takes about 22 minutes to
traverse the diameter of Earth's orbit. [15] However, its size was not known at that time. If Rømer had
known the diameter of the Earth's orbit, he would have calculated a speed of 227000000 m/s.
Another more accurate measurement of the speed of light was performed in Europe by Hippolyte
Fizeau in 1849.[16] Fizeau directed a beam of light at a mirror several kilometers away. A rotating cog
wheel was placed in the path of the light beam as it traveled from the source, to the mirror and then
returned to its origin. Fizeau found that at a certain rate of rotation, the beam would pass through
one gap in the wheel on the way out and the next gap on the way back. Knowing the distance to the
mirror, the number of teeth on the wheel and the rate of rotation, Fizeau was able to calculate the
speed of light as 313000000 m/s.
Léon Foucault carried out an experiment which used rotating mirrors to obtain a value of 298 000
000 m/s[16] in 1862. Albert A. Michelson conducted experiments on the speed of light from 1877 until
his death in 1931. He refined Foucault's methods in 1926 using improved rotating mirrors to
measure the time it took light to make a round trip from Mount Wilson to Mount San Antonio in
California. The precise measurements yielded a speed of 299 796 000 m/s.[17]
The effective velocity of light in various transparent substances containing ordinary matter, is less
than in vacuum. For example, the speed of light in water is about 3/4 of that in vacuum.
Two independent teams of physicists were said to bring light to a "complete standstill" by passing it
through a Bose–Einstein condensate of the element rubidium, one team at Harvard University and
the Rowland Institute for Science in Cambridge, Massachusetts and the other at the Harvard–
Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, also in Cambridge.[18] However, the popular description of light
being "stopped" in these experiments refers only to light being stored in the excited states of atoms,
then re-emitted at an arbitrary later time, as stimulated by a second laser pulse. During the time it
had "stopped", it had ceased to be light.

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