[Physics] Physics Digest, Vol 7, Issue 1

[cj at mb-soft.com]

Your one-way speed of light.

I may have done some useful experimemnts for you in 1992.  At that time, I was intrigued by the fact that very rarely during history, it had been noticed by astronomers that one of the four Galilean Moons of Jupiter "suddenly disappeared" for a few seconds.  It was thought that that only happened when the Earth was in a rare orbital plane of the Galilean Moons, where the Sun's light to get to one of the moons got blocked by one of the other moons.  People (then) had realized that can only happen for a few seconds, but, astoundingly, no one had ever done the math to predict the event.  So I decided to spend about six months in calculating the VSOP87 millions of terms to calculate the exact orbits.  After about si months of calculating, I arrived at a prediction of about four such events, several years later (which no one had ever predicted prior to that).  The events were only visible in desolate locations, and I did not see any of them.  Later, some other people did similalr calculations.

The point here is that the light had to travel around 500 million miles to get to us after the actual occultation occurred near Jupiter.  Observation timing and occultation timing would have allowed a really accurate calculation of a "one way trip" for the speed of light.

I don't know if anyone did that calculation, then or later.  But one of you might do the calculation I did regarding a mutual occultation of Galilean moons, really accurately, and also observed when it was witnessed here on Earth.  I think you could get a really accurate value for the one-way speed of light.

Carl Johnson
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