Ewa's Oceans
Flying Bike
So, there’s Galileo, right? It’s the year 1600 and our boy Galileo decides he’s going to figure out the speed of light. He concocts an experiment; he sends off a servant with a shuttered lantern and directs him to unshutter the light as a specific time. Galileo records how quickly he’s able to see the light. Clever boy, Galileo…but the experiment is a dismal failure. All he can report is that light is really really fast. Nice try, Galileo!
So it’s 70 years later, right? This Danish guy, Ole Christensen Rømer, is watching Io, one of the moons of Jupiter (guy has a lot of time on his hands) and he notices the eclipses of the moon become shorter as the Earth moves closer to Jupiter and longer as the Earth and Jupiter draw farther apart. He compares the time of those eclipses with the times those same eclipses appear in Paris (where Jean-Félix Picard — NOT the Star Trek Picard — has also been observing them). By doing some complex math stuff, Rømer is able to determine the approximate speed of light. Fine work, Danish Science Guy!
Now it’s the first Sunday in October, 2013. We know the speed of light to about thirty or forty digits. Okay, I’m just guessing here — maybe more than forty digits, maybe fewer than thirty. Doesn’t matter. Regardless of the actual speed of light, what matters is that it arrived at this corner just in time for Ewa to shoot this photograph. Nice teamwork, Ewa and Light!
Blog photograph copyrighted to the photographer and used with permission by utata.org. All photographs used on utata.org are stored on flickr.com and are obtained via the flickr API. Text is copyrighted to the author, greg fallis and is used with permission by utata.org. Please see Show and Share Your Work
