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It seems that if the aether drag hypothesis were true then stellar aberration would not occur because the light would be travelling in the aether which would be moving along with the telescope. Consider a bucket on a train about to enter a tunnel, and a drop of water drips from the tunnel entrance into the bucket at the very center.
Isaac Newton suggests the existence of an aether in the Third Book of Opticks (1st ed. 1704; 2nd ed. 1718): "Doth not this aethereal medium in passing out of water, glass, crystal, and other compact and dense bodies in empty spaces, grow denser and denser by degrees, and by that means refract the rays of light not in a point, but by bending them gradually in curve lines? ...
A category for pages that refer to theories of the aether (or "ether" ), a hypothetical physical medium (particulate or non-particulate) in which light might be said to propagate. Pages in category "Aether theories"
Experiments such as the Michelson–Morley experiment of 1887 (and later other experiments such as the Trouton–Noble experiment in 1903 or the Trouton–Rankine experiment in 1908), presented evidence against the theory of a medium for light propagation known as the luminiferous aether; a theory that had been an established part of science for nearly one hundred years at the time.
At the time of Fizeau's experiment, two different models of how aether related to moving bodies were discussed, Fresnel's partial drag hypothesis and George Stokes' complete aether drag hypothesis. Fresnel had Augustin-Jean Fresnel (1818) proposed his model to explain an 1810 experiment by Arago. In 1845 Stokes showed that complete aether drag ...
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Using a water-filled telescope, in 1871 Airy looked for a change in stellar aberration through the refracting water due to the aether drag hypothesis. [20] Like all other attempts to detect aether drift or drag, Airy obtained a negative result. George Biddell Airy did not set out to discover either a stationary or moving aether.
The Michelson-Morley experiment shows on the contrary that a hypothetical aether could not be moving relative to the Earth, that is, as the Earth orbits it would have to drag the aether along. Those two results are not incompatible per se, but in the absence of a model to reconcile them, they are more ad hoc than the explanation of both ...