In physics, c is the speed of light. That's a very fast speed indeed, roughly 310,000 km/s (or 186,000 miles/s). How and when was it first measured?
This is a piece of science history I'm very familiar with, but you may not be. It's very clever how it was done – in 1676! Dutch astronomer Ole Rømer made the measurements and Dutch mathemetician and astronomer Christaan Huygens did the arithmetic. They came up with a value of 218,000 km/s (or 131,000 miles/s) – not bad at all considering the state of scientific measurement almost 500 years ago!
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