Title: Reconsidering Experiments,
Abstract: Experiments may not reveal their full import at the time that they are
performed. The scientists who perform them usually are testing a specific
hypothesis and quite often have specific expectations limiting the possible
inferences that can be drawn from the experiment. Nonetheless, as Hacking has
said, experiments have lives of their own. Those lives do not end with the
initial report of the results and consequences of the experiment. Going back
and rethinking the consequences of the experiment in a new context, theoretical
or empirical, has great merit as a strategy for investigation and for
scientific problem analysis. I apply this analysis to the interplay between
Fizeau's classic optical experiments and the building of special relativity.
Einstein's understanding of the problems facing classical electrodynamics and
optics, in part, was informed by Fizeau's 1851 experiments. However, between
1851 and 1905, Fizeau's experiments were duplicated and reinterpreted by a
succession of scientists, including Hertz, Lorentz, and Michelson. Einstein's
analysis of the consequences of the experiments is tied closely to this
theoretical and experimental tradition. However, Einstein's own inferences from
the experiments differ greatly from the inferences drawn by others in that
tradition.