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Physics LibreTexts

2.1: The Speed of light

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When we observe and measure phenomena in the world, we try to assign numbers to the physical quantities with as much accuracy as we can possibly obtain from our measuring equipment. For example, we may want to determine the speed of light, which we can calculate by dividing the distance a known ray of light propagates over its travel time,  speed of light = distance  time. 

In 1983 the General Conference on Weights and Measures defined the speed of light to be =299,792,458 meters/second.
This number was chosen to correspond to the most accurately measured value of the speed of light and is well within the experimental uncertainty.


This page titled 2.1: The Speed of light is shared under a CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 license and was authored, remixed, and/or curated by Peter Dourmashkin (MIT OpenCourseWare) via source content that was edited to the style and standards of the LibreTexts platform.

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