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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? ...
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 ...
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"
This aether drag hypothesis was an attempt by classical physics to explain stellar aberration and the Fizeau experiment, but was discarded when Albert Einstein introduced his theory of relativity. Despite this, the expression light-dragging has remained in use somewhat, as discussed on this page.
4th-century BC – Aristotle publishes Physics, in which the aether is briefly described as being an element lighter than air that surrounds celestial bodies.He describes the aether in relation to other elements – aether is lighter than air and is located above it, whereas air is lighter than water, and water is lighter than earth.
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 ...