What we call ‘physics’ today has emerged from studies of

the natural world called natural philosophy. Among the

fundamental questions that both natural philosophy and
physics have been trying to answer are: What does our
natural world consist of? What are the laws that govern
the natural order of things? The Greek philosopher
Aristotle (384–322 BCE) employed a combination of
beliefs, observation and logic to grapple with these questions.
In the natural world of Aristotle, light was believed
to travel ‘instantaneously’, most likely because it was
‘observed’ to be so.
Around the 16th century, the English philosopher Francis
Bacon (1561–1626) proposed that systematic, detailed
experimentation must be an important part of the process
of finding answers to fundamental questions about the
natural world. In experimentation, measurement plays
a crucial role.
Many scientists coupled bold imagination with
experimentation to attempt to measure the speed of light.
The Italian Galileo (1564–1642) tried to measure the time
it took light to travel a fixed distance of a little over a
mile using lamp shutters operated by hand (Figure 1.1a).
The time proved so short that it could not have been
measured with the clocks of the day. Other scientists,
like the Danish Astronomer Ole Roemer (1644–1710),
the Frenchmen Hippolyte Louis Fizeau (1819–1896)
and Leon Foucault (1819–1868), and the Polish-born
American Albert A. Michelson (1852–1931), imagined
and carried out ingenious experiments. The result, it was
shown conclusively, was that light does travel at a finite,
measurable speed.