Abstract
The Fresnel's wave theory of light, far from being a mere theoretical speculation, enjoyed in the nineteenth century of recognition by the scientific community. This recognition was due to its ability to explain phenomena with very good agreement with the experimental results, at least up to first order approximations in . Many authors have already discussed the historical background in which this theory emerged and its implications for the physics by that time, as well as the experimental evidence supporting it, but the details of how these observations and / or experiments corroborate the Fresnel optics. In this work, we show how the Fresnel wave theory is able to explain experimental observations known at his time, namely: the aberration of light, the prism and the moving mirror in the ether, Fizeau's experiment.
Keywords:
optics; bodies in motion; ether; Fresnel
