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A simplified version of the Fizeau experiment for measuring the speed of light?

Physics Asked on December 9, 2020

Long ago in high school I saw a short film in which as I recall the apparatus was just a spinning paper plate (with holes along its edge) with a light source — I don’t recall a spinning mirror or a half-silvered mirror — and the entire experiment could be done in a classroom. The basic idea that even though the speed of light was very fast you could still spin the plate fast enough to affect whether the light was visible or not struck me as very clever and almost something that could have been done by Galileo except that getting a steady speed of rotation without a motor would have been hard.

So my question is, is there a simplified version of the Fizeau experiment that could be performed within a normal-sized room with just an electric motor, pie plate and a laser pen that will give a reasonable (if less accurate than in Fizeau’s actual setup) value for the speed of light or am I remembering wrongly?

One Answer

Fizeau used a folded light path that was very long, and mirrors to bounce the beam back and forth, and a very high-speed motor running the slotted disc. There is no way to spin a paper plate fast enough in a classroom to perform the fizeau experiment with a classroom-sized baseline for the light beam.

Answered by niels nielsen on December 9, 2020

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