50 years ago, physicists found the speed of light
Excerpt from the December 2, 1972 issue of Science News
In the 1970s, scientists measured the speed of light: 299,792.456 kilometers per second, or 299,792,456 meters per second. Fifty years later, they continue putting light through its paces.
Eduard Muzhevskyi/Science Photo Library/Getty
A New Figure for the Cosmic Speed Limit – Science News, December 2, 1972
A group at the National Bureau of Standards at Boulder, Colo., now reports an extremely accurate [speed of light] measurement using the wavelength and frequency of a helium-neon laser.… The result gives the speed of light as 299,792.4562 kilometers per second.
Update
That 1972 experiment measured the two-way speed of light, or the average speed of photons that traveled from their source to a reflective surface and back. The result, which still holds up, helped scientists redefine the standard length of the meter (SN: 10/22/83, p. 263). But they weren’t done putting light through its paces. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, photons set a record for slowest measured speed of light at 17 meters per second and froze in their tracks for one-thousandth of a second (SN: 1/27/01, p. 52). For all that success, one major hurdle remains: directly testing the one-way speed of light. The measurement, which many scientists say is impossible to make, could resolve the long-standing question of whether the speed of light is uniform in all directions.
