FIZEAU, ARMAND HIPPOLYTE - THE FIZEAU EXPERIMENT ON THE VELOCITY OF LIGHT IN MEDIA.

Sur les Hypothèses relatives a Lèther lumineux. Et sur une expérience qui parait démontrer que le mouvement des corps change la vitesse avec laquelle la lumiere se propage dans leur interieur; Presenté à l'Academie des Sciences dans sa séance du 29 septembre 1851.

Paris, Victor Masson, Imprimerie de Bachelier, 1859. 8vo. Contemp. hcalf, raised bands, gilt spine. Light wear along edges. Small stamps on verso of titlepage and on verso of plates. In "Annales de Chimie et de Physique", 3me Series - Tome LVII. 512 pp. and 4 plates. (The entire volume offered). Fizeau's paper: pp. 385-404. Some scattered brownspots.

First printing of a highly importent paper in the history of physics, "It is less famous, for some reason, than the failure of Michelson and Morley to detect the aether drag, but NO LESS SIGNIFICANT. For it showed that the velocity of light increases in a medium according to the formula, v (1 - 1/n2), where v is the velocity of the medium, and n is the refractive index"(Gillespie in "The Edge of Objecticity" p. 427). Fizeau shows that the velocity of light is higher in water flowing in the direction of the beam than that of light propagating in the direction opposite the direction of flow. The paper offered is the full text of the research, there appeared an extract of it in Comptes Rendus in 1851. Albert Einstein later pointed out the IMPORTENCE OF THE EXPERIMENT FOR SPECIAL RELATIVITY.
Fizeau's result was replicated by Albert Michelson and Edward Morley in 1886 repeated the experiment on a larger scale and confirmed Fizeau's results., and in 1914 it was confirmed by Pieter Zeeman. It was Arago in 1838, who suggested this "crucial experiment" to decide between the corpuscular and undulatory theories of light by comparingthe speed of light in water and in air.. It vindicated the undulatory position.

It was shown by Hendrik Lorentz (1892, 1895) that the experiment can be explained by the reaction of the moving water upon the interfering waves without the need of any aether entrainment. On this occasion, Lorentz introduced a different time coordinate for moving bodies within the aether, the so called Local time (an early form of the Lorentz transformation for small velocities compared to the speed of light). In 1895, Lorentz went a step further and explained the coefficient by local time alone and without mentioning any interaction of light and matter.

Order-nr.: 43122