Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 6.djvu/217

Rh The instrumental arrangements of these two experimentalists agreed only in the part which each borrowed from Poggendorff; the details differed so widely as to give to whatever agreement might appear in their results the force of an irresistible argument for their accuracy. The velocity of light, as found by Fizeau in 1849 by the artificial eclipses which the teeth of his revolving wheel produced, exceeds by about six per cent, the velocity which Foucault obtained, in 1862, with the moving mirror. The arithmetical mean of the two values comes very close to the astronomer's estimate of the velocity of light. But this simple average is precluded unless it can be proved that the two experiments are entitled to equal weight. The internal evidence, expressed by what mathematicians call the probable error, manifested a decisive preference for Foucault's result, and it has met with general acceptance. The soundness of the scientific judgment in this case has been placed beyond all cavil by Cornu, who has recently repeated Fizeau's experiment, with additional precautions, and resolved the discord into a marvelous accord. Fizeau's experiment, in spite of the numerical defect, was hailed as one of the grandest triumphs of experimental skill. In 1856 he received the prize of 30,000 francs which the Emperor of France had founded, to be given for the work or the discovery which, in the opinion of the five academies of the Institute, has conferred the greatest honor and service upon the nation. Hitherto, it had been supposed that nothing short of an interstellar or an interplanetary space was a match for the enormous velocity of light. And yet one physicist, by using a distance of less than six miles, and another, without going outside of his laboratory, have discovered what astronomers had searched heaven and earth to find out.

By these capital experiments the science of optics has achieved its own independence. Let us see what they have done, at the same time, for astronomy. The sequences in the eclipses of Jupiter's moons are modified by the velocity of light. The aberration of starlight is a measure of the ratio between the velocity of light and the velocity of the earth. For nearly two centuries our knowledge of the velocity of light leaned upon one or the other of these relations. If the velocity of light can be known from experiment, the problem may be reversed and the distance of the sun given to the astronomer. As soon as it appeared that Foucault's estimate of the velocity of light fell short of the astronomical valuation by about three per cent., it was certain that either the experiment was in error, or the received aberration was too small, or the reputed distance of the sun was too large. An error of three per cent, in the experiment or in the aberration was inadmissible. But it was conceivable that the distance of the sun should be at fault, even to this extent. The popular announcement that Foucault had picked a flaw in the astronomer's work was not correct. Astronomers had always known what those who pinned