- General considerations
- Forms of electromagnetic radiation
- Historical survey
Much effort has been devoted to measuring the speed of light, beginning with the aforementioned work of Rømer in 1676. Rømer noticed that the orbital period of Jupiter’s first moon, Io, is apparently slowed as the Earth and Jupiter move away from each other. The eclipses of Io occur later than expected when Jupiter is at its most remote position. This effect is understandable if light requires a finite time to reach the Earth from Jupiter. From this effect, Rømer calculated the time required for light to travel from the Sun to the Earth as 11 minutes. In 1728 James Bradley, an English astronomer, determined the speed of light from the apparent orbital motion of stars that is produced by the orbital motion of the Earth. He computed the time for light to reach the Earth from the Sun as eight minutes, 12 seconds. The first terrestrial measurements were made in 1849 by Fizeau and a year later by Foucault. Michelson improved on Foucault’s method and obtained an accuracy of one part in 100,000.
Any measurement of velocity requires, however, a definition of the measure of length and of time. Current techniques allow a determination of the velocity of electromagnetic radiation to a substantially higher degree of precision than permitted by the unit of length that scientists had applied earlier. In 1983 the value of the speed of light was fixed at exactly 299,792,458 metres per second, and this value was adopted as a new standard. As a consequence, the metre was redefined as the length of the path traveled by light in a vacuum over a time interval of 1/299,792,458 of a second. Furthermore, the second—the international unit of time—has been based on the frequency of electromagnetic radiation emitted by a cesium-133 atom.
After a long struggle electromagnetic wave theory had triumphed. The Faraday–Maxwell–Hertz theory of electromagnetic radiation seemed to be able to explain all phenomena of light, electricity, and magnetism. The understanding of these phenomena enabled one to produce electromagnetic radiation of many different frequencies which had never been observed before and which opened a world of new opportunities. No one suspected that the conceptional foundations of physics were about to change again.