Summary
We propose an experiment to test general relativity in which the light beam in one arm of a large interferometer runs by means of a small vacuum pipe through the center of a large sphere of water. The phase shift caused by the reduction of the propagation velocity of the light in the gravitational field of the sphere will be measurable with near-future technology. This phase shift has a surprisingly large sensitivity to the details of the metric inside the sphere where the energy-momentum tensor is non-zero. The interior metric of general relativity yields results about 25 per cent higher than a comparison metric which has the same Newtonian gravitational field. This allows us to investigate general relativity experimentally with non-zero energy-momentum tensor for the first time.
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Ross, D.K. Testing general relativity inside a mass distribution using an interferometer. Nuov Cim B 109, 863–870 (1994). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02722464
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02722464