Speed of light is only possible to verify experimentally that the two-way speed of light (for example, from a source to a mirror and back again) is frame-independent, because it is impossible to measure the one-way speed of light (for example, from a source to a distant detector) without some convention as to how clocks at the source and at the detector should be synchronized. However, by adopting Einstein synchronization for the clocks, the one-way speed of light becomes equal to the two-way speed of light by definition. The special theory of relativity explores the consequences of this invariance of "c" with the
Speed of light an alternative symbol for the speed of light, introduced by James Clerk Maxwell in 1865. In 1894, Paul Drude redefined with its modern meaning. Einstein used "V" in his original German-language papers on special relativity in 1905, but in 1907 he switched to , which by then had become the standard symbol for the speed of light. Sometimes is used for the speed of waves in "any" material medium, and for the speed of light in vacuum. This subscripted notation, which is endorsed in official SI literature, has the same form as other related constants: namely, "μ" for the vacuum