Light in a
vacuum travels at a constant speed of 299,792,458 m/s (about 186,000 miles per
second). This unusual value is rather arbitrary and it depends on the agreements
that we approved back in 1970s of what a second and what a meter is. Light
itself, always moves in a vacuum at the constant speed – here, in the Andromeda
galaxy, and in the extreme reaches of the visible universe.
And while
we consider it as the speed of light, it crops up in so many places in physics
that it is reductive to just reflect it linked to electromagnetism. It is the
speed at which massless particles travel, and no data can be transmitted in our
universe faster than this particular value.
So why is
it this value? Why is it always constant? And why does it arise everywhere? We
don’t have a definite answer just yet. It is one of those things we don’t know
that suggest at the compound machinery of the universe... optimistically just
hiding behind a shade we are seeing flapping.
THE
FORMULA OF THE SPEED OF LIGHT
Generally,
there are been many thoughts about how quickly light travels – but the first
serious tentative proof that it was fast but limited came in the 1600s with OleRømer, who observed that apparent intervals in the orbit of Jupiter’s moon Io
could be described by the speed of light being finite.
Since that
early assessment, the value got more and more distinguished, but the
game-changing instant came thanks to Maxwell’s theory of electromagnetism. In
this theory, light is assumed as an electromagnetic wave and its speed can be described
in terms of two other constants.
In this
formula, ε0 denotes the electric constant and μ0 is the magnetic constant. Both
of them are dependent on other constants of the universe, such as elementary
charge and the fine structure constant.
0 Comments