He also discovered that the speed of light equals c.
Where c is defined as the speed of light
And that’s why we take vitamin C!
And it is remarkably consistent at doing that.
*in vacuo
But when you think about light’s speed in medium it seems like absorption and re emission which shifts light’s net velocity. The speed of light between the interaction is still c. That becomes obvious if you zoom into matter and find its mostly empty likr vaccum
No, that’s not really a useful way of modeling it for the case of light traveling through a linear medium.
The absorption/re-emission model implicitly localizes the photons, which is problematic — think about it in an uncertainty principle (or diffraction limit) picture: it implies that the momentum is highly uncertain, which means that the light would get absorbed but re-emitted in every direction, which doesn’t happen. So instead you can make arguments about it being a delocalized photon and being absorbed and re-emitted coherently across the material, but this isn’t really the same thing as the “ping pong balls stopping and starting again” model.
Another problem is to ask why the light doesn’t change color in a (linear) medium — because if it’s getting absorbed and re-emitted, and is not hitting a nice absorption line, why wouldn’t it change energy by exchanging with the environment/other degrees of freedom? (The answer is it does do this — it’s called Raman scattering, but that is generally a very weak effect.)
The absorption/emission picture does work for things like fluorescence. But Maxwell’s equations, the Schrödinger equation, QED — these are wave equations.
Uh, that discovery actually predated Einstein. He simply explained how the speed of light was constant for all observers
To be more accurate actually, he and his first wife explained it
You mean Mileva Marić and her husband?
I was blanking on her name. Sadly she is almost never given the credit she deserves
Didn’t want to make you fell like you have defend yourself, just wanted to turn it around and shitpost. But yeah, she rarely does.
I was also lowkey referencing the famous photo caption from am interview with “Amal Clooney, famous and successful lawyer and human rights activist, and her husband, an actor”. Referring to a certain George.
Oh I didn’t feel like you were attacking me, rather I appreciated you posting her name
ಠ_ಠ
This is unaceptable…you have to be assholes to each other.
I’m reasonably sure that Einstein’s breakthrough was more that he assumed light only travels at the speed of light and the all the equations worked.
Every experiment since has confirmed it.
The other way around. Experiments said that light always moves at C and he deduced what follows from that for space time.
Yeah, but is it a wave or a particle, eh, Einstein? Answer that!
Well, he did get a Nobel price for saying it’s a particle.
Yes.
