The New Yorker

By the time that Felix Eberty, a German jurist and amateur astronomer, anonymously published “The Stars and World History,” in 1846, it was well known that light had a finite speed. Ole Rømer, a Danish scientist working in Paris, had proved as much more than a century and a half earlier. It took the sun’s rays a little over eight minutes to reach Earth, Jupiter’s up to fifty-two minutes, and Uranus’s more than two and a half hours. Read More >>