How Einstein found the speed of light
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Einstein did no such calculation (except perhaps as an exercise).
The speed of light was first measured by Danish astronomer Olaus Roemer in 1676.
Some two hundred years later, the equations of Maxwell predicted that the velocity of electromagnetic waves is c=1/ϵ0μ0−−−−√c=1/ϵ0μ0 where ϵ0ϵ0 and μ0μ0 are the permittivity and permeability of the vacuum, respectively. The fact that this value came close to the already experimentally well known value of the speed of light prompted Maxwell to conjecture in 1865 that light itself is electromagnetic radiation.
By the time Einstein came around, it was all old news. What Einstein did was to take seriously the implications of Maxwell’s theory, namely that the vacuum speed of light is not dependent on the velocity of the person observing it. This invariance of the vacuum speed of light is the fundamental postulate of the special theory of relativity.
The speed of light was first measured by Danish astronomer Olaus Roemer in 1676.
Some two hundred years later, the equations of Maxwell predicted that the velocity of electromagnetic waves is c=1/ϵ0μ0−−−−√c=1/ϵ0μ0 where ϵ0ϵ0 and μ0μ0 are the permittivity and permeability of the vacuum, respectively. The fact that this value came close to the already experimentally well known value of the speed of light prompted Maxwell to conjecture in 1865 that light itself is electromagnetic radiation.
By the time Einstein came around, it was all old news. What Einstein did was to take seriously the implications of Maxwell’s theory, namely that the vacuum speed of light is not dependent on the velocity of the person observing it. This invariance of the vacuum speed of light is the fundamental postulate of the special theory of relativity.
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