page_title: Fizeau experiment
section_title: Experimental setup
hierarchical_section_title: Fizeau experiment / Experimental setup
caption_attribution_description: English: Retouched version of File:Fizeau-Mascart1.png to fix a few broken and smeared lines.
context_page_description: The Fizeau experiment was carried out by Hippolyte Fizeau in 1851 to measure the relative speeds of light in moving water. Fizeau used a special interferometer arrangement to measure the effect of movement of a medium upon the speed of light.
  According to the theories prevailing at the time, light traveling through a moving medium would be dragged along by the medium, so that the measured speed of the light would be a simple sum of its speed through the medium plus the speed of the medium. Fizeau indeed detected a dragging effect, but the magnitude of the effect that he observed was far lower than expected. His results seemingly supported the partial aether-drag hypothesis of Fresnel, a situation that was disconcerting to most physicists. Over half a century passed before a satisfactory explanation of Fizeau's unexpected measurement was developed with the advent of Albert Einstein's theory of special relativity. Einstein later pointed out the importance of the experiment for special relativity, in which it corresponds to the relativistic velocity-addition formula when restricted to small velocities.
context_section_description: A highly simplified representation of Fizeau's 1851 experiment is presented in Fig. 2. Incoming light is split into two beams by a beam splitter (BS) and passed through two columns of water flowing in opposite directions. The two beams are then recombined to form an interference pattern that can be interpreted by an observer.
  The simplified arrangement illustrated in Fig. 2 would have required the use of monochromatic light, which would have enabled only dim fringes. Because of white light's short coherence length, use of white light would have required matching up the optical paths to an impractical degree of precision, and the apparatus would have been extremely sensitive to vibration, motion shifts, and temperature effects. 
  On the other hand, Fizeau's actual apparatus, illustrated in Fig. 3 and Fig. 4, was set up as a common-path interferometer. This guaranteed that the opposite beams would pass through equivalent paths, so that fringes readily formed even when using the sun as a light source.
  The double transit of the light was for the purpose of augmenting the distance traversed in the medium in motion, and further to compensate entirely any accidental difference of temperature or pressure between the two tubes, from which might result a displacement of the fringes, which would be mingled with the displacement which the motion alone would have produced; and thus have rendered the observation of it uncertain.
  — Fizeau
  A light ray emanating from the source S′ is reflected by a beam splitter G and is collimated into a parallel beam by lens L. After passing the slits O₁ and O₂, two rays of light travel through the tubes A₁ and A₂, through which water is streaming back and forth as shown by the arrows. The rays reflect off a mirror m at the focus of lens L′, so that one ray always propagates in the same direction as the water stream, and the other ray opposite to the direction of the water stream. After passing back and forth through the tubes, both rays unite at S, where they produce interference fringes that can be visualized through the illustrated eyepiece. The interference pattern can be analyzed to determine the speed of light traveling along each leg of the tube.
caption: Figure 4. Setup of the Fizeau Experiment (1851)
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