Lightspeed: The Ghostly Aether and the Race to Measure the Speed of Light

This book tells the human story of one of man's greatest intellectual adventures - how it came to be understood that light travels at a finite speed, so that when we look up at the stars, we are looking back in time. From the ancient Greeks measuring the distance to the sun, to today's satellite navigation and Einstein's theory of relativity, the book takes the reader on a gripping historical journey. It looks at how Galileo with his new telescope discovered the moons of Jupiter and used their eclipses as a global clock, allowing travellers to find their Longitude. We are also told of how Ole Roemer, noticing that the eclipses were a little late, used this to obtain the first measurement of the speed of light, which takes eight minutes to get to us from the sun. We then move from the remarkable international collaborations to observe the Transits of Venus, including Cook's voyage to Australia, to the extraordinary achievements of Young and Fresnel, whose discoveries eventually taught us that light travels as a wave but arrives as a particle, and all the quantum weirdness which follows. In the nineteenth century, we find Faraday and Maxwell, struggling to understand how light can propagate through the vacuum of space unless space is filled with a ghostly vortex Aether foam. We follow the brilliantly gifted experimentalists Hertz, discoverer of radio, Michelson with his search for the Aether wind, and Foucault and Fizeau with their spinning mirrors and lightbeams across the rooftops of Paris. Messaging faster than light using quantum entanglement, and the reality of the quantum world, conclude this saga.

About the Author :
John C. H. Spence, Regent's Professor of Physics, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ, US John C. H. Spence teaches at Arizona State University, with research and teaching in condensed matter physics, electron microscopy and biophysics. He is currently Snell Professor and Director of Science for the National Science Foundation's eight-campus "BioXFEL" consortium. This is devoted to the use of the recently invented x-ray laser in biology, providing movies of molecular machines at work with femtosecond time resolution. John is the author of texts on electron microscopy. He is also a keen musician, pilot and sailor.