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 in 1957, and by several researchers starting from the late 1980s. The speed of light in vacuum instead is considered a constant, and defined by the SI as 299792458 m/s. Variability of the speed of light is therefore equivalent with a variability of the SI meter and/or the SI second. VSL should not be confused with faster than light theories; nor should it be confused with the fact that the speed of light in a medium is slower than the speed of light in vacuum depending on the medium's refractive index. While Einstein first mentioned a variable speed of light