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The light reflected from Io must, therefore, take some time to reach Earth with the greatest "delay" occurring when Earth and Jupiter were at their maximal separation. Romer explained that this lag is probably because the Earth and Jupiter moved in different orbits and as they did so the distance between them was changing. Much to his joy, perhaps relief, this was indeed the case allowing him to gloat in front of his skeptical colleagues at the Observatory. In September of the same year, he correctly predicted the one eclipse on November the 9th should be about ten minutes "late". As he continued his observations, he found that over several months the eclipses seemed to lag more and more behind what might otherwise be expected. This motion is predictable and handy for this kind of experiment. This moon is eclipsed by Jupiter pretty regularly as it orbited the giant planet. Working at his Paris Observatory in 1676, he began to make a systematic study of I0, one of Jupiter's moons. It is believed he used a water clock to measure the time lag for the experiment. He did, however, manage to deduce that light must travel at least ten times faster than sound.ĭanish Astronomer Ole Romer began to make the first real measurements of the speed of light about 50 years after Galileo. He concluded that light "if not instantaneous, it is extraordinarily rapid". He couldn't detect a perceptible time lag, as we would expect today given light's speed. Galileo claims to have run this experiment, but as you can guess, to no avail. This was to enable the experiment to discover whether there is, in fact, a perceptible time interval and the speed of light. Once they become accustomed to the process, they were to repeat the process over ever greater distances until finally needing telescopes to view one another's lantern lights. This process should be repeated several times so that the participants become well practiced to improve reaction times to as small as possible.
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Then the other one observing the first lantern's light immediately uncovers their own. First, one of the lantern bearers uncovers their lantern. He suggested having two people at a known distance from one another with covered lanterns. Galileo's idea to measure the speed of light was surprisingly simplistic. Later in the piece, Galileo goes on to suggest a means of potentially measuring the speed of light. Galileo went on to deduce that nothing about its speed can, in fact, be gleaned from simply observing light. "Everyday experience shows that the propagation of light is instantaneous for when we see a piece of artillery fired at great distance, the flash reaches our eyes without lapse of time but the sound reaches the ear only after a noticeable interval," he wrote Later, in 1638, the great Galileo, in his work Two New Sciences, summed up the Aristotelian position pretty neatly. As you can imagine, the results were somewhat inconclusive. He asked observers whether they could see any difference in when the explosion flash was reflected from each mirror with their eyes. In 1629, using gunpowder, he placed mirrors at various distances from an explosions. One of the first serious attempts to measure the speed of light came from Dutch Scientist Isaac Beeckman. Descartes went on to postulate that the speed of light is infinite or instantaneous and that it even sped up through denser mediums. As this did not seem to occur, Descartes reached the same conclusion as Aristotle. Jumping forward to the 17th century, Johannes Kepler came to the conclusion that, if the speed of light was finite, the Sun, Earth, and Moon should be out of alignment during lunar eclipses. It states that, if light has to travel from point A to point B, it will always take the shortest route possible.
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Addittionally, Heron ultimately formulated the principle of the shortest path of light. Later, Heron of Alexandria argued that the speed of light is probably infinite since distant objects, stars etc, appear immediately when you open your eyes. "light is due to the presence of something, but it is not a movement" - AristotleĮuclid and Ptolemy built upon Empedocles's ideas and speculated that light was emitted from the eye which enabled sight. True to form, Aristotle disagreed with this assumption. Aristotle seemed to suggest that light traveled instantaneously. He famously quotes Empedocles, who suggested that the light from the Sun must take some time to get to Earth. Some of the earliest discussions appear to be from Aristotle. Research into it actually began far, far earlier. However, this is only the most recent individuals to work on this issue. Groundbreaking work from the likes of Romer and Einstein seem to have finally put that to bed.