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Foucault measured the differential speed of light through air versus water by using two distant mirrors (Figure 2). He placed a 3-meter tube of water before one of them. [5]: 127 The light passing through the slower medium has its image more displaced. By partially masking the air-path mirror, Foucault was able to distinguish the two images ...
According to the Stokes' hypothesis, the speed of light should be increased or decreased when "dragged" along by the water through the aether frame, dependent upon the direction. [S 5]: 33 The overall speed of a beam of light should be a simple additive sum of its speed through the water plus the speed of the water.
For example, for visible light, the refractive index of glass is typically around 1.5, meaning that light in glass travels at c / 1.5 ≈ 200 000 km/s (124 000 mi/s); the refractive index of air for visible light is about 1.0003, so the speed of light in air is about 90 km/s (56 mi/s) slower than c.
The gem is placed on a high refractive index prism and illuminated from below. A high refractive index contact liquid is used to achieve optical contact between the gem and the prism. At small incidence angles most of the light will be transmitted into the gem, but at high angles total internal reflection will occur in the prism.
The two-way speed of light is the average speed of light from one point, such as a source, to a mirror and back again. Because the light starts and finishes in the same place, only one clock is needed to measure the total time; thus, this speed can be experimentally determined independently of any clock synchronization scheme.
According to the "strong" form of Fermat's principle, the problem of finding the path of a light ray from point A in a medium of faster propagation, to point B in a medium of slower propagation , is analogous to the problem faced by a lifeguard in deciding where to enter the water in order to reach a drowning swimmer as soon as possible, given ...
For instance, the Fizeau wheel could measure the speed of light to perhaps 5% accuracy, which was quite inadequate for measuring directly a first-order 0.01% change in the speed of light. A number of physicists therefore attempted to make measurements of indirect first-order effects not of the speed of light itself, but of variations in the ...
Figure 1. The light path through a Michelson interferometer.The two light rays with a common source combine at the half-silvered mirror to reach the detector. They may either interfere constructively (strengthening in intensity) if their light waves arrive in phase, or interfere destructively (weakening in intensity) if they arrive out of phase, depending on the exact distances between the ...