Читать книгу Stigmatic Optics - Rafael G González-Acuña - Страница 20

The speed that a wave propagates is presented in the standard form of the wave equation given by the following equation,

where A⃗ is the wave and ² is the speed of the wave. Therefore, we can take the speed of the waves of equations (1.24) and (1.25) as,

Evaluating the values of the constants we get the speed of the electromagnetic waves in the vacuum, which is given as

Normally the above quantity is called speed of light and it is denoted by the letter c, thus we set

c≡2.9979×108ms−1.(1.29)

Throughout the book we are going to use the notation presented in equation (1.29),