History
| 1675 | Rømer and Huygens, moons of Jupiter | 220,000 |
| 1729 | James Bradley, aberration of light | 301,000 |
| 1849 | Hippolyte Fizeau, toothed wheel | 315,000 |
| 1862 | Léon Foucault, rotating mirror | 298,000±500 |
| 1907 | Rosa and Dorsey, EM constants | 299,710±30 |
| 1926 | Albert Michelson, rotating mirror | 299,796±4 |
| 1950 | Essen and Gordon-Smith, cavity resonator | 299,792.5±3.0 |
| 1958 | K.D. Froome, radio interferometry | 299,792.50±0.10 |
| 1972 | Evenson et al., laser interferometry | 299,792.4562±0.0011 |
| 1983 | 17th CGPM, definition of the metre | 299,792.458 (exact) |
Until the early modern period, it was not known whether light travelled instantaneously or at a very fast finite speed. The first extant recorded examination of this subject was in ancient Greece. The ancient Greeks, Muslim scholars and classical European scientists long debated this until Rømer provided the first calculation of the speed of light. Einstein's Theory of Special Relativity concluded that the speed of light is constant regardless of one's frame of reference. Since then, scientists have provided increasingly accurate measurements.
Read more about this topic: Speed Of Light
Famous quotes containing the word history:
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There are only two great currents in the history of mankind: the baseness which makes conservatives and the envy which makes revolutionaries.”
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“No matter how vital experience might be while you lived it, no sooner was it ended and dead than it became as lifeless as the piles of dry dust in a school history book.”
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“What you don’t understand is that it is possible to be an atheist, it is possible not to know if God exists or why He should, and yet to believe that man does not live in a state of nature but in history, and that history as we know it now began with Christ, it was founded by Him on the Gospels.”
—Boris Pasternak (1890–1960)