By studying the length of the eclipse during different times of the year, Romer hoped to determine an accurate orbital period of the moon. In 1676, the Danish astronomer Ole Roemer was studying Jupiter's moon Io. The speed of light was actually determined almost 350 years ago. My big question here though, was when was the speed of light determined? This story was published several decades before Einstein, so who discovered how fast light moves and how? So if you had a race horse with a top speed of 35 miles per hour, then indeed, the speed of light would be 19 million times faster. Of course you must take into account that perhaps the fastest race horse of today is not the same as the ones in the mid-1800's. The speed of light then works out to ~15 million times the speed of the fastest race horse. The maximum speed of a race horse is ~44 miles per hour, or ~0.122 miles per second.Ĭonverting, the speed of light is therefore ~670,000,000 miles per hour, or ~186,000 miles per second. The speed of light has currently been measured to be 3 x 10^8 meters per second (or more accurately 299,792,458 m/s). The sunlight takes eight minutes and some odd seconds to travel nearly one hundred million miles." "But all this is like the gait of a sloth, or the pace of a snail, in comparison with the speed of light, which travels nineteen million times faster than the fastest race horse. Since there are so many geological references throughout his Fairy Tale career, I have noted each story from which the reference comes from. Anderson was also fairly accurate in a lot of his geologically descriptive passage that are still accurate to this day, even almost 200 years later. Hans Christian Anderson's Complete Fairy TalesĪ Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Courtĭespite this not being my favorite book I ever read, or even anywhere near an enjoyable book, there were actually quite a bit of geological references sprinkled through Anderson's publishing history. Indiana Jones and the Chronology of Chaos.