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Light travels in a vacuum at a speed sometimes called c, which is very close to 300,000 kilometers per second (or 300,000,000 meters per second if you prefer). Light will be observed to travel at slower speeds when it is passing through some form of transparent matter such as glass. If you examine light on a sufficiently small scale, however, you would discover that it always does travel at the speed c. When it is passing through transparent matter, the electromagnetic fields of atoms causes the light to move in a highly curved path, essentially like a skier doing a slalom course, even though the light will emerge from the transparent matter moving once again in a straight line. Light takes longer to pass through transparent matter because it is travelling a longer distance, not because it is actually any slower. But it seems to be slower.

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