Expert: Marc Ebelini - 5/28/2009

Question
Dear sir,

i have a question that who did the successful experiment of calculating the speed of the light? i tried Galileo and Olaf Roemer but this is wrong.

can you plz help me for this sir.

Thank you.
Tajuddin

Answer
This sounds like a home work question but I will say that the first correct close guess was James Bradley at 289 Kmps All those before him like Galileo were not even close. The final accepted measurement using microwave equipment was performed by Louis Essen and Gordon Smith and measured 299.792 Kmps. Naturally in designing antennas I use the round number of 300,000 or 300 when dealing in MHz.
Most libraries will have the chronological events of the studies to measure the speed of light. Many people have worked on this over the years before and well after Galileo. The theories were good but they had poor equipment to measure time delays for their experiments. Galileo had no way of measuring time in microseconds. By todays standards that is now a course measurement. Some of those tests were performed at one mile distances that means the delay was a 5.3 micro second delay. How was Galileo going make that measurement?