S. Orlov is professor in Petrozavodsk State University, Russia
Abstract
For many years, scientists - physicists have tried to measure the speed of light. Galileo - in the seventeenth century. Early experiment to measure the speed of light was held Ole Roemer, a Danish physicist, in 1676. Another, more accurate way to measure the speed of light is made in Europe Hippolyte Fizi in 1849. Francois Arago determines the speed of light in 1838 by a rotating mirror. In 1862, on the production of the speed of light worked Leon Foucault. In 1926, a result of years of efforts Albert Michelson has had some very high accuracy of the speed of light: Ñ = 299 796 000±4 000 m/s. The main and paradoxical conclusion in the study was his invariance speed of light. In other words, the speed of light is the same in all inertial frames of reference is independent of the velocity of the observer and emitter. This surprising fact for the classical physics of his time for the first time proved the Michelson experiment: the independence of the speed of light on the direction (isotropic) and the orbital motion of the Earth around the sun. In the future, this paradox was confirmed by astronomers. In particular, Willem de Sitter in monitoring the spectral binaries found that the speed of light flux from removing the stars and approaches are constant speed of light (c) and equal to each other. That is, they do not depend on the rate of the star (light sources). From the point of view of classical physics this paradox so far can’t be explained. Therefore, on the basis of the unknown properties of light in 1905, Einstein proposed the special theory of relativity (STR) in the paper “On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies”
