I like Huygen’s idea of a finite speed of light, but I wondered, is its propagation finite? If our telescopes are seeing light that is billions of light years old, and the light is still going, is there an infiniteness to its propagation? Maybe light is both finite and infinite? Or as John Milton described it poetically, an ‘eternal, co-eternal beam’?
As far as we know, there is no limit to the propagation of light, unless something blocks it. Of course, the intensity drops in an inverse-square relation with the distance from the source, as was first stated by Kepler in 1604 in his Astronomiae Pars Optica (The Optical Part of Astronomy).
I like Huygen’s idea of a finite speed of light, but I wondered, is its propagation finite? If our telescopes are seeing light that is billions of light years old, and the light is still going, is there an infiniteness to its propagation? Maybe light is both finite and infinite? Or as John Milton described it poetically, an ‘eternal, co-eternal beam’?
As far as we know, there is no limit to the propagation of light, unless something blocks it. Of course, the intensity drops in an inverse-square relation with the distance from the source, as was first stated by Kepler in 1604 in his Astronomiae Pars Optica (The Optical Part of Astronomy).
See my post (https://johnplaice.substack.com/p/johannes-kepler-and-inverse-square).