Nowadays the speed of light is a clear example of how precisely values ​​can be measured, it is so firmly established that even the meter is defined depending on it. However, before the 17th century, no one could approach the speed of light, and many scientists believed it was infinite and that light could travel any distance instantly. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why violent video games should not be banned”?Get the original essayGalileo Galilei was one of the first to attempt to measure the speed of light. Yet his method was too simple and could not provide any conclusive results, leading him to the idea that light travels at least ten times faster than sound. Then, in the 17th and 18th centuries, there were two significant measurements of wave speed. light. One of these was the experiment conducted by Danish astronomer Ole Roemer, who measured the speed of light at 240,000 kilometers per second by determining the time that light traveled from the moons of Jupiter when the Earth was getting closer and closer to Jupiter. While James Bradley, an English physicist, used stellar aberration to find the speed of light in a vacuum, giving it a value of 301,000 kilometers per second, which is quite close to the accepted value. A century later, a very famous experiment was carried out by a French scientist named Armand Fizeau, who used a gear and a mirror. These were spaced eight kilometers apart, and Fizeau observed that when the cogwheel spun fast enough, the light actually struck one of the cogs on its way back from the mirror. He knew how fast the cog wheel was spinning and measured the time it took for the wheel to move across the width of a single cog, which he figured would be equal to the time the light traveled to the mirror and back. The result he obtained was 313,300 kilometers per second. Again, this value was not precise enough. Keep in mind: this is just a sample. Get a personalized article from our expert writers now. Get a personalized essay In 1862, a very close value was obtained by Jean-Bernard-Léon Foucault. Foucault improved Fizeau's apparatus by replacing the cogwheel with a rotating mirror, leading the device to be named the Fizeau-Foucault Apparatus. Foucault obtained a value of 299,796 kilometers per second for the speed of light. While the speed of light is defined as 299,792.458 kilometers per second according to a 1983 declaration of the 17th General Congress of Weights and Measures. Later, experimental methods became more and more precise thanks to the development of new, highly precise technologies...