The speed of light in a vacuum is 2.998 × 10 8 8 m/s. how long does it take for light to circumnavigate the earth, which has a circumference of around 24,900 miles? do not enter “seconds” as part of your answer.

- 0.134 seconds

Solution:- The speed is given as and the circumference is 24900 miles which is same as the distance light have to covered. It asks to calculate the time required to cover this distance by the light.

We need to do unit conversion from miles to meter as the speed is given in meter per second.

1 mile = 1609.34 meter

So,

= 40072566 meters

Know that,

It's rearranged to time as,

Let's plug in the values in it:

= 0.134 seconds

So, the light would take 0.134 seconds to travel the mentioned speed. The answer without the unit is 0.134.

most historians agree that gabriel mouton, the vicar of st. paul’s church in lyons, france, is the “founding father” of the metric system. he proposed a decimal system of measurement in 1670. mouton based it on the length of one minute of arc of a great circle of the earth (now called a nautical mile, 1852 meters). he also proposed the swing-length of a pendulum with a frequency of one beat per second as the unit of length (about 25 cm). a pendulum beating with this length would have been fairly easy to produce, thus facilitating the widespread distribution of uniform standards. over the years, his work was revised, improved, and extended by a number of french scientists.

the political sponsor of weights and measures reform in the french revolutionary national assembly was the bishop of autun, better known as talleyrand. under his auspices, the french academy appointed several committees to carry out the work of developing a usable system of weights and measures for france. one of the committees recommended a decimalized measurement system based upon a length equal to one ten-millionth of the length of a quadrant of the earth’s meridian (i.e., one ten-millionth of the distance between the equator and the north pole).