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
In the Light of What We Know when the true pleasure of a work of fiction is its gravitational pull upon us?” In a 4,000-word review for "The New Yorker", the critic James Wood described Rahman as “a deep and subtle storyteller,” and praised the novel as “astonishingly achieved…Isn’t this kind of thinking—worldly and personal, abstract and concrete, essayistic and dramatic—exactly what the novel is for? How it justifies itself as a form?…"In the Light of What We Know" is what Salman Rushdie once called an ‘everything novel.’ It is wide-armed, hospitable, disputatious, worldly, cerebral. Ideas and provocations abound on every page.” Australian literary critic Louise Adler