Free Republic
Browse · Search
General/Chat
Topics · Post Article

To: Lonesome in Massachussets
The first sentence of the article is wrong. Einstein never assigned a speed to light, he simply posited that the vacuum speed of light is invariant in all inertial reference frames.

Thank you.

Einstein didn't measure the speed of light. He wasn't an experimental physicist. He was a theoretical physicist. Theoretical physicists don't make contraptions to measure things.

Speed of light history.

62 posted on 06/28/2014 6:20:42 PM PDT by samtheman
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 53 | View Replies ]


To: samtheman

The actual velocity of one particular guage boson in free space is a happy accident and a convenient way to measure c, but “c” is much deeper than that. It’s a structural constant of spacetime, and whatever its value happens to be, spacetime will behave as the appropriate field equations require with that value of “c” subsituted in for the lorentz tranformations etc. What actual photons do is largely irrelevant since einstein’s field equations would still be true if there was no charge and hence no EM fields to give rise to photons in the first place.


71 posted on 06/28/2014 10:25:48 PM PDT by SpaceBar
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 62 | View Replies ]

Free Republic
Browse · Search
General/Chat
Topics · Post Article


FreeRepublic, LLC, PO BOX 9771, FRESNO, CA 93794
FreeRepublic.com is powered by software copyright 2000-2008 John Robinson