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The Michelson interferometer is a common configuration for optical interferometry and was invented by the 19/20th-century American physicist Albert Abraham Michelson. Using a beam splitter , a light source is split into two arms.
[A 2] Of this experiment, Albert Einstein wrote, "If the Michelson–Morley experiment had not brought us into serious embarrassment, no one would have regarded the relativity theory as a (halfway) redemption." [A 3]: 219 Michelson–Morley type experiments have been repeated many times with steadily increasing sensitivity.
Albert Abraham Michelson (surname pronunciation anglicized as Michael-son; December 19, 1852 – May 9, 1931) was an American physicist known for his work on measuring the speed of light and especially for the Michelson–Morley experiment.
Figure 1. The light path through a Michelson interferometer.The two light rays with a common source combine at the half-silvered mirror to reach the detector. They may either interfere constructively (strengthening in intensity) if their light waves arrive in phase, or interfere destructively (weakening in intensity) if they arrive out of phase, depending on the exact distances between the ...
Schematic diagram of a Michelson interferometer, configured for FTIR. In a Michelson interferometer adapted for FTIR, light from the polychromatic infrared source, approximately a black-body radiator, is collimated and directed to a beam splitter. Ideally 50% of the light is refracted towards the fixed mirror and 50% is transmitted towards the ...
Albert A. Michelson (1881) tried to measure the relative motion of the Earth and aether (Aether-Wind), as it was expected in Fresnel's theory, by using an interferometer. He could not determine any relative motion, so he interpreted the result as a confirmation of the thesis of Stokes. [12]
The Michelson–Morley experiment of 1887 had suggested that the hypothetical luminiferous aether, if it existed, was completely dragged by the Earth.To test this hypothesis, Oliver Lodge in 1897 proposed that a giant ring interferometer be constructed to measure the rotation of the Earth; a similar suggestion was made by Albert Abraham Michelson in 1904.
The Michelson–Gale–Pearson experiment (1925) is a modified version of the Michelson–Morley experiment and the Sagnac-Interferometer.It measured the Sagnac effect due to Earth's rotation, and thus tests the theories of special relativity and luminiferous ether along the rotating frame of Earth.