The Speed of Light

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the speed of light. Scientists and thinkers have been fascinated with the speed of light for millennia. Aristotle wrongly contended that the speed of light was infinite, but it was the 17th Century before serious attempts were made to measure its actual velocity - we now know that it’s 186,000 miles per second. Then in 1905 Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity predicted that nothing can travel faster than the speed of light. This then has dramatic effects on the nature of space and time. It’s been thought the speed of light is a constant in Nature, a kind of cosmic speed limit, now the scientists aren’t so sure.

→ Listen on BBC Sounds website

Guests

• John Barrow 4 episodes
  Professor of Mathematical Sciences and Gresham Professor of Astronomy at Cambridge University
• Iwan Morus 4 episodes
  Senior Lecturer in the History of Science at The University of Wales, Aberystwyth
• Jocelyn Bell Burnell 3 episodes
  Visiting Professor of Astrophysics at Oxford University

Related episodes

• Relativity
  
  6 Jun, 2013 530 Physics
• The Photon
  
  12 Feb, 2015 530 Physics
• The Physics of Time
  
  18 Dec, 2008 530 Physics
• Time
  
  30 Dec, 1999 530 Physics
• Optics
  
  1 Mar, 2007 530 Physics
• Maxwell
  
  2 Oct, 2003 530 Physics
• Wormholes
  
  26 Sep, 2024 530 Physics
• The Age of the Universe
  
  3 Mar, 2011 520 Astronomy
• Albert Einstein
  
  14 Sep, 2023 530 Physics
• Laws of Nature
  
  19 Oct, 2000 530 Physics

Experimental. For more related episodes, visit the visual explorer.

---

Programme ID: p0038x9h

Episode page: bbc.co.uk/programmes/p0038x9h

Auto-category: 535 (Light and related radiation)

Hello (First sentence from this episode)

Hello, this week we're discussing the speed of light.