Is "the speed of light" the correct terminology?

Question

Should it not be "the speed of Electromagnetic waves"? Light,afterall does not exists but in the human brain.

Answer 1

All of the terminologies and method which we define are only for the sake of making it easy to the human brain. if it was not so then neither the fields like Vectors, trigonometry, matrices etc had been defined by human. because there all are nothing but the shortcuts which can make unsolvable complex problems easier.

Now coming to ur question, other people have pointed it right that it will be a bit complex to say. And that also when it is one of the most popular and known topic among non physicists.

But it has a historical reason also. In earlier days it was not realized that light is actually just one constituent of the electromagnetic spectrum. Its speed was a topic of quite amazement for scientists because it was fast enough for calculating by those day apparatus. So many experiments done attempting to measure the speed of visible light was failed. Later when it was calculated then it is seen just as a succession of those earlier experiments,and in scientific literature it was referred to as the corrected speed of light only. So the term speed of light became popular although it was known that it is the speed of not only the 'light part' of spectrum but the whole spectrum.

Answer 2

Light does exist independent of the human brain, and existed before humans existed. The speed of light is correct terminology. It happens to be the same for all electromagnetic waves, not just those visible to the human eye.

Answer 3

It's too general, and covers far more than just light. We consider the speed of light to be the light we can see, the certain length of electromagnetic waves, not the entire thing.

Answer 4

The term, electromagnetic waves, is much to complicated for lazy people much like me, so we call it light. If you have questions, go back in time and ask einstine.

Answer 5

You are correct.