Ole Christensen Rømer (1644 - 1710) was a Danish astronomer who in 1676 made the first quantitative measurements of the speed of light. He did this by noticing that the timetable for the eclipses of the moons of Jupiter were about 1000 seconds late when observed during a total Solar eclipse. He deduced that this was because under these conditions light had to travel across the Earth's orbit, a distance of around 186 million miles. Therefore he calculated that the speed of light was about 186,000 miles per second.

Roughly. Historically correct information should, at some point, replace the above wild speculation.


One of the Famous People on this site.
Last change to this page
Full Page history
Links to this page
Edit this page
  (with sufficient authority)
Change password
Recent changes
All pages
Search