How Fast Is It | 02 - The Speed of Light

We start with the slow moving snail and work up through people, animals, birds, cars, aircraft and spaceships. Along the way we graph speeds on a space-time diagram. Following the history of land speed records, we cover the speed of sound and include its nature as a longitudinal wave and its speed in dry air.

We then cover the Galilean transformations for converting speeds from one reference frame to another. We increase the velocities to the point where we see light traveling at different speeds as far as the Galilean transformations are concerned. We then show how Galileo tried and failed to measure the speed of light.

Then we show how Antonio Louis Fizeau did measure the speed of light. We then cover wave interference and the Michelson Interferometer. And using the interferometer, we cover the Michelson-Morley experiment that showed that the speed of light was a constant.