On Tuesday 16 November 2004 01:19 pm, Rob wrote:
> Karel J. Bosschaart wrote:
> >On Tue, Nov 16, 2004 at 07:39:13AM -0700, Dan MacMillan wrote:
> >>>-----Original Message-----
> >>>From: Andrew Sinclair
> >>>By the way, speed of light in the other thread is way off. The "accepted
> >>>constant" is bogus. The average speed is actually closer to 2.4 million
> >>>kilometers per second.
> >>
> >>You'd better cite your source and / or reasoning, as ~3*10^8m/s =is= the
> >>accepted constant speed of light in vacuum.
> >
> >Yes indeed. Also, the word 'average' makes the statement pretty
> >meaningless without specifying how the averaging is done (different
> >materials I think?).
>
> OK, I'll bite on this. Check www.nist.gov. They occasionally update
> the fundamental physical constants, but we are talking about incredibly
> small amounts.
I have no idea how this got onto stable@, but I just have to comment. The
speed of light in a vacuum, in m/s, is never going to change because... yes,
that's right, the meter is defined so that c=299792458 m/s. This is why
CODATA says the value is exact.
Of course, it's a lot easier just to use natural units where c=1...
-David
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