“Aether Drag” and Moving Images

Abstract

We contrast the two situations in which either a light beam is incident on a moving medium or a moving optical image is incident on a stationary medium. The principle of relativity suggests that the effects on the light of propagating through the medium should be similar. We find, however, that there are subtle differences which we can understand in terms of the relative alignment of the Poynting and wave vectors. Our analysis and experiments investigate both translational motion and rotation.