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Updated: May 19, 2025
Light-velocity is a mathematical standard or constant not because there is an absolute value in 186,000 miles a second, but because no material body, whose mass increases with its velocity, can ever attain the velocity of light. Stated another way: only a material body whose mass is infinite could equal the velocity of light.
The scarcely perceptible errors which still impede its application are of such a nature as to accumulate year by year; eventually, then, they will challenge, and must receive, a more and more perfect correction. The light-velocity method, however, claimed, and for some years justified, M. Faye's preference.
Three basic concepts form the foundation for the present-day scientific description of a vast field of optical phenomena, among them the occurrence of the spectral colours as a result of light passing through a transparent medium of prismatic shape. They are: 'optical refraction', 'light-ray', and 'light-velocity' the latter two serving to explain the first.
He proves mathematically that the velocity of light is, so far as man's finite mind is concerned, the only CONSTANT in a universe of unstayable flux. On the sole absolute of light-velocity depend all human standards of time and space.
Not abstractly eternal as hitherto considered, time and space are relative and finite factors, deriving their measurement validity only in reference to the yardstick of light-velocity. In joining space as a dimensional relativity, time has surrendered age-old claims to a changeless value. Time is now stripped to its rightful nature-a simple essence of ambiguity!
In an age when the existence of a measurable light-velocity seems to belong to the realm of facts long since experimentally proved; when science has begun to measure the universe, using the magnitude of this velocity as a constant, valid for the whole cosmos; and when entire branches of science have been founded on results thus gained, it is not easy, and yet it cannot be avoided, to proclaim that neither has an actual velocity of light ever been measured, nor can light as such ever be made subject to such measurement by optical means and that, moreover, light, by its very nature, forbids us to conceive of it as possessing any finite velocity.
This apparent proof of the absolute constancy of light-velocity which seemed, however, to contradict other observations induced Einstein to do away with the whole assumption of a bearer of the movement underlying light, whether the bearer were supposed to be at rest or itself in motion.
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