Lightspeed: The Ghostly Aether and the Race to Measure the Speed of Light

This is the human story and adventures of the great scientists who measured the speed of light – which takes eight minutes to get here from the sun, so that when we look at the stars we are looking back in time. The book narrates how, since the ancient Greeks, scientists from Faraday, Maxwell, Fizeau and Michelson struggled to understand how light can travel through the vacuum of outer space, unless it is filled with a ghostly invisible vortex Aether foam. The reader moves from Galileo’s observations of the eclipses of Jupiter’s moon for navigation, to Einstein’s theories and his equation E = mc2, and all the quantum weirdness which followed. Space probes, the Transit of Venus expeditions, the discovery of radio, optics and satellite navigation, and the amazing scientific instruments built to detect the Aether wind are described.