In the 1970s, scientists measured the speed of light: 299,792,456 meters per second. Fifty years later, they continue putting light through its paces.
Eduard Muzhevskyi/Science Photo Library/Getty
A New Figure for the Cosmic Speed Limit – Science News , December 2, 1972
A group at the National Bureau of Standards at Boulder, Colo., now reports an extremely accurate [speed of light] measurement using the wavelength and frequency of a helium-neon laser.… The result gives the speed of light as 299,792.4562 kilometers per second.
That 1972 experiment measured the two-way speed of light, or the average speed of photons that traveled from their source to a reflective surface and back. The result, which still holds up, helped scientists redefine the standard length of the meter ( SN: 10/22/83, p. 263 ). But they weren’t done putting light through its paces. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, photons set a record for slowest measured speed of light at 17 meters per second and froze in their tracks for one-thousandth of a second ( SN: 1/27/01, p. 52 ). For all that success, one major hurdle remains: directly testing the one-way speed of light. The measurement, which many scientists say is impossible to make, could resolve the long-standing question of whether the speed of light is uniform in all directions.
A version of this article appears in the December 3, 2022 issue of Science News .
L.V. Hau et al . Light speed reduction to 17 metres per second in an ultracold atomic gas . Nature . Vol. 397, February 18, 1999, p. 594. doi: 10.1038/17561.
Nikk Ogasa is a staff writer who focuses on the physical sciences for Science News . He has a master’s degree in geology from McGill University, and a master’s degree in science communication from the University of California, Santa Cruz.
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