Episode 1929
Speed of light
Tue, 2022-Aug-16 01:15 UTC
Length - 4:57
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Welcome to featured Wiki of the Day where we read the summary of the featured Wikipedia article every day.
The featured article for Tuesday, 16 August 2022 is Speed of light.
The speed of light in vacuum, commonly denoted c, is a universal physical constant that is important in many areas of physics. Its exact value is defined as 299792458 metres per second (approximately 300000 km/s or 186000 mi/s). According to the special theory of relativity, c is the upper limit for the speed at which conventional matter, energy or any signal carrying information can travel through space.
All forms of electromagnetic radiation, including visible light, travel at the speed of light. For many practical purposes, light and other electromagnetic waves will appear to propagate instantaneously, but for long distances and very sensitive measurements, their finite speed has noticeable effects. Starlight viewed on Earth left the stars many years ago, allowing humans to study the history of the universe by viewing distant objects. When communicating with distant space probes, it can take minutes to hours for signals to travel from Earth to the spacecraft and vice versa. In computing, the speed of light fixes the ultimate minimum communication delay between computers, to computer memory, and within a CPU. The speed of light can be used in time of flight measurements to measure large distances to extremely high precision.
Ole Rømer first demonstrated in 1676 that light travels at a finite speed (non-instantaneously) by studying the apparent motion of Jupiter's moon Io. Progressively more accurate measurements of its speed came over the following centuries. In a paper published in 1865, James Clerk Maxwell proposed that light was an electromagnetic wave, and therefore travelled at the speed c. In 1905, Albert Einstein postulated that the speed of light c with respect to any inertial frame is a constant and is independent of the motion of the light source. He explored the consequences of that postulate by deriving the theory of relativity and in doing so showed that the parameter c had relevance outside of the context of light and electromagnetism.
Massless particles and field perturbations such as gravitational waves also travel at the speed c in vacuum. Such particles and waves travel at c regardless of the motion of the source or the inertial reference frame of the observer. Particles with nonzero rest mass can be accelerated to approach c, but can never reach it, regardless of the frame of reference in which their speed is measured. In the special and general theories of relativity, c interrelates space and time, and also appears in the famous equation of mass–energy equivalence, E = mc2. In some cases objects or waves may appear to travel faster than light (e.g. phase velocities of waves, the appearance of certain high-speed astronomical objects, and particular quantum effects). The expansion of the universe is understood to exceed the speed of light beyond a certain boundary.
The speed at which light propagates through transparent materials, such as glass or air, is less than c; similarly, the speed of electromagnetic waves in wire cables is slower than c. The ratio between c and the speed v at which light travels in a material is called the refractive index n of the material (n = c/v). For example, for visible light, the refractive index of glass is typically around 1.5, meaning that light in glass travels at c/1.5 ≈ 200000 km/s (124000 mi/s); the refractive index of air for visible light is about 1.0003, so the speed of light in air is about 90 km/s (56 mi/s) slower than c.
This recording reflects the Wikipedia text as of 01:15 UTC on Tuesday, 16 August 2022.
For the full current version of the article, see Speed of light on Wikipedia.
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This has been Amy Neural. Thank you for listening to featured Wiki of the Day.
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