Talk:Speed of light

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Speed of light is a featured article; it (or a previous version of it) has been identified as one of the best articles produced by the Wikipedia community. Even so, if you can update or improve it, please do so.

This article appeared on Wikipedia's Main Page as Today's featured article on October 29, 2004, and on August 16, 2022.

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There is a request, submitted by ScientistBuilder (talk)ScientistBuilderScientistBuilder (talk) 17:18, 29 January 2022 (UTC), for an audio version of this article to be created. For further information, see WikiProject Spoken Wikipedia.[reply]

The rationale behind the request is: "The speed of light is central to physics fields including the Big Bang Theory, special relativity, general relativity, spectroscopy, optics, as well as real world applications such as signal processing and GPS networks".

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Why not also include an accurate description of c in miles per second?

186282.3970512 mi/s, to be fairly accurate.

Speed of light in literature

I think there needs to be a section about speed of light in popular culture somewhere, namely the teleportation gimmick used areas like in Star Wars and Kingdom Hearts. The disambiguation mentions a few examples but not this article. Jordf32123 (talk) 00:00, 15 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]

We already have a page on Teleportation and one on Teleportation in fiction and on warp drive. Johnjbarton (talk) 01:32, 15 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]

A fairly well-known old science-fiction story where the speed of light plays a prominent role is "The Xi Effect" by Philip Latham. The speed of light actually remains the same, but other things change, resulting in the doom of the universe... AnonMoos (talk) 07:41, 15 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Capacitance and inductance of vacuum

Does anyone see the absurdity of the terms capacitance and inductance of vacuum? 2A01:36D:3500:451A:2C3A:B7C7:9DC4:BFF0 (talk) 16:34, 26 February 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Many real phenomena are deeply counterintuitive. Is there a point related to improving the article? Remsense ‥ 论 16:36, 26 February 2025 (UTC)[reply]

c for celeritas? Citation needed, but not Isaac Azimov

There doesn't seem to be any evidence that the symbol c for the speed of light was chosen because of the Latin word celeritas. Isaac Azimov gets credit for starting this rumor in a 1959 article entitled "c for celeritas", but he provided no historical evidence or further explanation. A search on Google Scholar or Google Books from 1800–1958 comes up negative. This doesn't appear to be a thing. 2603:7000:9501:3A00:51AB:5E91:97E:83D4 (talk) 04:00, 27 February 2025 (UTC)[reply]

The article now has several refs concerning the name and I altered the text to be clearer that the issue is unclear. Johnjbarton (talk) 17:26, 27 February 2025 (UTC)[reply]