Speed of light special theory of relativity, in which the speed of light in vacuum "c" featured as a fundamental constant, also appearing in contexts unrelated to light. This made the concept of the stationary aether (to which Lorentz and Poincaré still adhered) useless and revolutionized the concepts of space and time. In the second half of the 20th century much progress was made in increasing the accuracy of measurements of the speed of light, first by cavity resonance techniques and later by laser interferometer techniques. These were aided by new, more precise, definitions of the metre and second. In 1950, Louis Essen
Variable speed of light While the measured value was later provided by Eddington in 1919, Albert Einstein went through several versions of light speed theory between 1905 and 1915, eventually concluding that light speed is constant when gravity does not have to be considered but that the speed of light cannot be constant in a gravitational field with variable strength. In the same book Einstein explained that he intended light speed to be a vector when it was described by coordinates in a reference frame. Einstein was not explicit about whether the speed of light would change in a gravity field, or whether just