Abstract
In the Fall of 1900, Frederick T. Trouton started work on an ingenious experiment in his laboratory at Trinity College in Dublin. The purpose of the experiment was to detect the earth’s presumed motion through the ether, the 19th-century medium thought to carry light waves and electric and magnetic fields. The experiment was unusual in that, unlike most of these so-called ether drift experiments, it was not an experiment in optics.1 Trouton tried to detect ether drift by charging and discharging a capacitor in a torsion pendulum at its resonance frequency, which he hoped would set the system oscillating. The basic idea behind the experiment came from George Francis FitzGerald, whose assistant Trouton was at the time. According to FitzGerald, a capacitor moving through the ether should experience an impulse, a jolt, upon being charged or discharged. Trouton’s torsion pendulum was designed to detect these jolts. Not surprisingly from a modern relativistic point of view, Trouton found no such effect. FitzGerald died in February 1901 before the experiment was concluded. It was thus left to others to try and reconcile Trouton’s result with then current electromagnetic theory.
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Janssen, M. (2003). The Trouton Experiment, E = MC 2, and a Slice of Minkowski Space-Time. In: Renn, J., et al. Revisiting the Foundations of Relativistic Physics. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-010-0111-3_3
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