Timeline for Was it suspected that the speed of electricity was equal to the speed of light?
Current License: CC BY-SA 4.0
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| Feb 10, 2020 at 8:39 | history | edited | Conifold | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
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| Jan 26, 2020 at 18:18 | comment | added | John Duffield | @conifold: many thanks. Sorry to be slow replying. | |
| Jan 1, 2020 at 0:23 | comment | added | Conifold | @JohnDuffield See What have we learned from Einstein's unsuccessful dream of unifying electromagnetism and gravity? The way speed of light "varies" in GR is subtle, see Does gravity slow the speed that light travels? | |
| Dec 31, 2019 at 15:22 | comment | added | John Duffield | Great answer Conifold. Do you know anything about Einstein's attempts to combine EM and gravity? In 1920 he said this: “As a simple geometric consideration shows, the curvature of light rays occurs only in spaces where the speed of light is spatially variable”. That suggests $\frac1{\sqrt{μ_0ε_0}} $ varies. | |
| Dec 28, 2019 at 9:15 | comment | added | releseabe | Thanks -- reassuring that one of the most intelligent human in history intuited what Maxwell later showed. If JCM had been born a little earlier, they might have met. | |
| Dec 28, 2019 at 9:03 | comment | added | Conifold | @releseabe Gauss wrote to Weber in 1845 suggesting "action, not instantaneous, but propagated in time in a similar manner to that of light", see Action at a Distance. Weber soon developed a version of electrodynamics (alternative to Maxwell's) with velocity dependent potentials. But the instantaneity of gravity was not questioned until the later electromagnetic theories (although the idea of EM gravity dates back to Mossotti, 1830). | |
| Dec 28, 2019 at 1:47 | comment | added | releseabe | It seems to me that by 1837 there would have been plenty of sophisticated people, Gauss among them, who would have objected to the statement that signals propagated instantaneously. | |
| Dec 27, 2019 at 19:20 | history | edited | Conifold | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
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| Dec 27, 2019 at 17:52 | history | edited | Conifold | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
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| Dec 27, 2019 at 5:49 | history | edited | Conifold | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
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| Dec 27, 2019 at 5:34 | history | edited | Conifold | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
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| Dec 27, 2019 at 5:32 | vote | accept | releseabe | ||
| Dec 27, 2019 at 5:32 | comment | added | releseabe | Just what I was looking for. | |
| Dec 27, 2019 at 5:25 | history | answered | Conifold | CC BY-SA 4.0 |