Synopsis
Excerpt from The Principle of Relativity: Original Papers
Arago''s prism experiment - The refractive index of a glass prism depends on the incident velocity of light outside the prism and its velocity inside the prism after refraction. On Fresnel''s fixed ether hypothesis, the incident light waves are situated in the stationary ether outside the prism and move with velocity 0 with respect to the ether. If the prism moves with a velocity u with respect to this fixed ether, then the incident velocity bf light with respect to the prism should be c+u. Thus the refractive index of the glass prism should depend on a, the absolute velocity of the prism, i.e., its velocity with respectto the fixed ether. Arago performed the experiment in 1819, but failed to detect the expected change.
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Présentation de l'éditeur
Lord Kelvin writingin 1893, in his preface to theE nglish edition of Hertz sR esearches onE lectric Waves, says many workers and many thinkers have helped to bnild up the nineteenth century school of plenuD ij one etiier for light, heat, electricity, magnetism ;and the German andE nglish volumes containing Hertz selectrical papers, given to the world in the last decade of the century, will be a permanent monument of the splendid cons mmation now realised. Ten years later, in 1905, we find Einstein declarinsj that the ether will be proved to be superflous. At first sight the revolution in scientific thought brought about in the course of a single decade appears to be almost too violent. A more careful even though a rapid review of the subject will, however, show how the Theory of Relativity gradually became a historical necessity. Towards the beginning of the nineteenth century, the luminiferous ether came into prominence as a result of the brilliant successes of the wave theory in the hands of Young andF resnel. In its stationary aspect the elastic solid ether was the outcome of the search for a medium in which the light waves may undulate. This stationary ether, as shown by Young, also afforded a satisfactory explanation of astronomical aberration. But its very success gave rise to a host of new questions all bearing on the central problem of relative motion of ether and matter.
(Typographical errors above are due to OCR software and don't occur in the book.)
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