Google is celebrating the 340th anniversary of the determination of the speed of light.
On December 7, 1976, the Journal des sçavans reported this discovery. Being Europe’s first scientific journal, it is still operating under the name of Journal des Savants.
Danish Astronomer Ole Rømer found an inconsistency in the predicted and actual appearances of the eclipses of Jupiter’s moon Io.
In the Paris’ Royal Academy of Sciences, Rømer predicted that there is a ten minutes delay in the predicted time when Io would come out of Jupiter’s shadow on November 16, 1676.
While Romer was not really focussed on calculating the speed of light, his main aim was to explain the inconsistencies of the immersion or emergence of Io during its eclipses.
Rømer calculated that light would take roughly ten to eleven minutes to travel a distance equal to half the diameter of a terrestrial orbit
The estimation came out close to 220,000 kilometres per second, which is twenty-six percent lower than the actual value.
This brought out a new prediction by Rømer that the light has a finite speed. This was not the belief in the scientific community at the time.
Since Ole Rømer had only indirectly hinted at the speed of light, there is an ongoing debate over the credits for the discovery. Christiaan Huygens was the first one to calculate the approximate value in units prevalent in the scientific world.
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