Physics for beginners/11-the elusive ether

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Hippolyte Fizeau created this device in 1851 and used an interferometer to establish that something was incomprehensible about the speed of light if it is travelling through rapidly moving water. This was 54 years before Einstein published his paper on special relativity.

Fizeau used interferometry to calculate the difference between the speed of light in stationary and moving water. Interferometry is not easy to explain, and would make for a good student term-paper that could be published on some wiki:

Wikipedia:Interferometry is long, tedious, and will be incomprehensible to most readers.
Wikipedia:Simple:Interferometry is essentially a blank page for us to develop.
Wikibooks:Waves/Interferometers isn't bad and worth looking at if you plan to write something different on the same topic.
On Wikiversity we have Physics/Fringes, Physics_equations/Oscillations,_waves,_and_interference#Beats_and_group_velocity.

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Each subpage is devoted to a chapter of Matthew Raspanti's original work. Click the image of the pdf file shown to the right to read the chapter.

To read other works by this author visit http://www.thenatureofthings.info/index.html

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