Light is the fastest thing in the Universe. It travels almost 300, 000km (186,000 miles) in one second. In a single year, light travels 9,500,000,000,000km (5,900,000,000,000 miles) — or 9.5 trillion km (5.9 trillion miles). This distance is called a light year. It is used by astronomers to describe the enormous distances between stars and galaxies in space.
Early scientists, unable to perceive light’s motion, thought it must travel instantaneously. Over time, however, measurements of the motion of these wave-like particles became more and more precise. Thanks to the work of Albert Einstein and others, we now understand light speed to be a theoretical limit: light speed — a constant called “c” — is thought to be not achievable by anything with mass, for reasons explained below. That doesn’t stop sci-fi writers, and even some very serious scientists, from imagining alternative theories that would allow for some awfully fast trips around the universe.
The first known discourse on the speed of light comes from the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle, who penned his disagreement with another Greek scientist, Empedocles. Empedocles argued that because light moved, it must take time to travel. Aristotle, believing light to travel instantaneously, disagreed.
In 1667, the Italian astronomer Galileo Galilei stood two people on hills less than a mile apart, each holding a shielded lantern. One uncovered his lantern; when the second saw the flash, he uncovered his, as well. By observing how long it took for the light to be seen by the first lantern-holder (and factoring out reaction times), he thought he could calculate the speed of light. Unfortunately, Galileo’s experimental distance of less than a mile was too small to see a difference, so he could only determine that light traveled at least 10 times faster than sound.
In the 1670s, Danish astronomer Ole Roomer used eclipses of Jupiter’s moon, Io, as a chronometer for the speed of light when he made the first real measurement of the velocity. Over the course of several months, as Io passed behind the giant gas planet, Roomer found that the eclipses came later than calculations anticipated, although over the course of several months, they drew closer to the predictions. He determined that light took time to travel from Io to Earth. The eclipses lagged the most when Jupiter and Earth were farthest apart, and were on schedule as they were closer. According to NASA, “that gave Roomer convincing evidence that light spread in space with a certain velocity.”
He concluded that light took 10 to 11 minutes to travel from the sun to Earth, an overestimate since it in fact takes eight minutes and 19 seconds. But at last scientists had a number to work with — his calculation presented a speed of 125,000 miles per second (200,000 km/s).
In 1728, English physicist James Bradley based his calculations on the change in the apparent position of the stars due Earth’s travels around the sun. He put the speed of light at 185,000 miles per second (301,000 km/s), accurate to within about 1 percent.
Picture Credit : Google
