Today the speed of light is a clear example of the precision with which values ​​can be measured, it is so firmly established that even the meter is defined by it. However, before the 17th century no one could approximate the speed of light, and many scientists thought it was infinite and that light could travel any distance instantaneously. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an original essay Galileo Galilei was one of the first to try to measure the speed of light. However, his method was too simple and could not provide any conclusive results, which led him to the idea that light travels at least ten times faster than sound. Later, during the 17th and 18th centuries, two significant measurements of the speed of light were made. light. One of these was the experiment conducted by Danish astronomer Ole Roemer, who measured the speed of light as 240,000 kilometers per second by calculating the time that light traveled from Jupiter's moons when Earth was closest to and farthest from Jupiter. . While James Bradley, an English physicist, used stellar aberration to find the speed of light in vacuum, which gave him 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 cogwheel and a mirror. These were positioned five miles apart, and Fizeau observed that when the cogwheel was rotated fast enough, the light actually hit one of the gears as it bounced back from the mirror. He knew how fast the gear wheel rotated and measured the time it took for the wheel to move the width of a single gear, which he thought would be equal to the time it took for light to travel to the mirror and back. The result he obtained was 313,300 kilometers per second. However, even this was not accurate enough. Please note: this is just an example. Get a custom article from our expert writers now. Get a Custom Essay In 1862, a very close value was obtained by Jean-Bernard-Leon Foucault. Foucault improved Fizeau's apparatus by replacing the cogwheel with a rotating mirror, which led to the apparatus being called the Fizeau-Foucault Apparatus. Foucault obtained a value for the speed of light of 299,796 kilometers per second. 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. Subsequently, experimental methods have become increasingly accurate due to the development of new and highly accurate technology.