Translations:The speed of light/6/en
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which says that the diameter divided by the time lag equals the velocity of light, c. (Note that we are using accurate numbers here, not the inaccurate ones of the seventeenth century.) Huygens gave full acknowledgment to Roemer. Huygens wrote, “But that which I only employed as an hypotheses, has recently received great verisimilitude as an established truth by the imaginative proof of Mr. Roemer” (Huygens, 1690[1]). Such a great speed of light was almost unimaginable, and not surprisingly, it took about 50 years for Roemer’s demonstration to gain full acceptance. From then on, however, increasingly accurate measurements of the speed of light were obtained from ingenious experiments.
- ↑ Huygens, C., 1690, Traité de la Lumière [Treatise on Light, in which are explained the causes of that which occurs in reflection and in refraction, and particularly in the strange refraction of Iceland Crystal]: The Hague. Republished by Macmillan and Company, London, 1912.