How Fast Does Light Travel?

| The Speed of Light

by Nola Taylor Redd, Space.com Contributor | May 22, 2012 08:37pm ET

The speed of light in a vacuum is 186,282 miles per second (299,792 kilometers per second), and in
theory nothing can travel faster than light. In miles per hour, light speed is, well, a lot: about 670,616,629
mph. If you could travel at the speed of light, you could go around the Earth 7.5 times in one second.

Early scientists, unable to perceive lights 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 acheivable by anything with mass, for
reasons explained below. That doesnt 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.

Speed of light: History of the theory

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 stood two people on a hill at a distance of less than a mile, 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 distances
were too small to see a difference, so he could only determine that light traveled at least ten times faster
than sound.

In the 1670s, Danish astronomer Ole Rmer used eclipses of Jupiter's moon, Io, as a chronometer for the
speed of light. Over the course of several months, as Io passed behind the giant gas planet, Rmer 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. He concluded that light took ten to eleven minutes to travel from the sun to Earth, an
overestimate since it in fact takes 8 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.

Two attempts in the mid-1800s brought the problem back to Earth. French physicist Hippolyte Fizeau set
a beam of light on a rapidly-rotating toothed wheel, with a mirror set up 5 miles away to reflect it back to
its source. Varying the speed of the wheel allowed Fizeau to calculate how long it took for the light to
travel out of the hole, to the adjacent mirror, and back through the gap. Another French physicist, Leon
Foucault, used a rotating mirror rather than a wheel. The two independent methods each came within
about 1,000 miles per second of the speed of light measured today.

Prussian-born Albert Michelson, who grew up in the United States, attempted to replicate Focault's
method in 1879, but used a longer distance, as well as extremely high-quality mirrors and lenses. His
result of 186,355 miles per second (299,910 km/s) was accepted as the most accurate measurement of
the speed of light for 40 years, when Michelson remeasured it.

Einstein and special relativity

In 1905, A