eam of light?This sounds very foolish and naturally many people at that time thought the same. But it had a concrete background in the scientific circles of the later 19th century. They had begun to measure the speed of light and that is were it all started.But to understand the issue we have to go back a bit to Issac Newtown who was revolutionary scientist and discovered the law of gravity and the basics of the laws of physics. These were not revolutionary, but revolutionary was the ability to get a mathematical grasp on it so they could calculate.Newtown made it possible to calculate the path of a bullet. Very important for the military.He made an interesting observation. When you take a ball in your hand and throw it, the ball will have a certain speed while it is moving away from you. But if you see somebody in a train throwing a ball the speed of the ball adds up to the speed of the train. This does not seem to be the case if you are yourself in the train throwing that ball. The ball moves away with the same speed as it did when you performed the same thing on the earth.The Speed of the ball is dependant on the viewpoint. Depends from where you measure it. This is a kind of Newtownian Relativity. The speed of an observed incident - like a flying ball - depends on your own speed.If you are throwing it while standing firmly on the earth, the ball just has - well the speed with which you are throwing it. But if you a train coming by and you see somebody inside throwing a ball in the direction of the movement of the train, what is the speed of the ball for you?Of course the speed of the train plus the speed with which a person threw the ball.This means the measure of speed is relative to the speed of the one observing.Science get puzzled when they started to measure the speed of light. They measured it at 186.000 miles per second. At that speed light will travel in 1.5 seconds from the Earth to the Moon a distance of 240.000 miles. 670...
