In a story that will probably get latency junkies hurriedly excited, it was announced through a research paper that a fiber network was created that allowed for the transmission of data that traveled at 99.7% of the speed of light. The team of researchers at the University of Southampton in England did so by creating air-filled fiber optic cables. The data they sent through these cables did so at a mind-blowing bandwidth of 10 terabytes per second.
That’s almost fast enough to stop my Hulu playback on my Playstation 3 to stop stuttering when I watch episodes of Family Guy or The Office
In the ExtremeTech article, they mention the fact that “the speed of light in a vacuum is 299,792,458 meters per second, or 186,282 miles per second”. However, that may not be true.
In an unrelated article that was published today, universities in both Germany and France have begun to question whether the speed of light is as constant as Einstein and pioneers before him thought it was. In the research by the two universities, a better understanding of vacuums indicate that some of the long-standing beliefs about their characteristics may be disputable. This is due to the presence and absence of particles on a quantum level.
Of course, I’m still trying to wrap my head around the original mechanisms and methods used to measure the speed of light in the first place