Sean Carroll’s Physics Thanksgiving

Sean Carroll in Preposterous Universe:

This year we give thanks for a feature of the physical world that many people grumble about rather than celebrating, but is undeniably central to how Nature works at a deep level: the speed of light. (We’ve previously given thanks for the Standard Model Lagrangian, Hubble’s Law, the Spin-Statistics Theorem, conservation of momentum, effective field theory, the error bar, gauge symmetry, Landauer’s Principle, the Fourier Transform and Riemannian Geometry.)

The speed of light in vacuum, traditionally denoted by c, is 299,792,458 meters per second. It’s exactly that, not just approximately; it turns out to be easier to measure intervals of time to very high precision than it is to measure distances in space, so we measure the length of a second experimentally, then definethe meter to be “the distance that light travels 299,792,458 of in one second.” Personally I prefer to characterize c as “one light-year per year”; that’s equally exact, and it’s easier to remember all the significant figures that way.

There are a few great things about the speed of light. One is that it’s a fixed, universal constant, as measured by inertial (unaccelerating) observers, in vacuum (empty space). Of course light can slow down if it propagates through a medium, but that’s hardly surprising. The other great thing is that it’s an upper limit; physical particles, as far as we know in the real world, always move at speeds less than or equal to c.

That first fact, the universal constancy of c, is the startling feature that set Einstein on the road to figuring out relativity. It’s a crazy claim at first glance: if two people are moving relative to each other (maybe because one is in a moving car and one is standing on the sidewalk) and they measure the speed of a third object (like a plane passing overhead) relative to themselves, of course they will get different answers. But not with light. I can be zipping past you at 99% of c, directly at an oncoming light beam, and both you and I will measure it to be moving at the same speed. That’s only sensible if something is wonky about our conventional pre-relativity notions of space and time, which is what Einstein eventually figured out.

More here.