This doesn’t actually seem to match the description. They only talk about having used one laser, with two stakes, whereas your diagram requires using two lasers. Your setup would be quite difficult to achieve, since you would somehow have to get both lasers perfectly horizontal; I’m not sure a standard laser level would give you this kind of precision. In the version they describe, they level the laser by checking the height of the beam on a second stake. This seems relatively easy.
My guess is they just never did the experiment, or they lied about the result. But it would be kind of interesting to repeat it sometime.
This doesn’t actually seem to match the description. They only talk about having used one laser, with two stakes, whereas your diagram requires using two lasers. Your setup would be quite difficult to achieve, since you would somehow have to get both lasers perfectly horizontal; I’m not sure a standard laser level would give you this kind of precision. In the version they describe, they level the laser by checking the height of the beam on a second stake. This seems relatively easy.
My guess is they just never did the experiment, or they lied about the result. But it would be kind of interesting to repeat it sometime.
Would Snell’s Law possibly explain it? Someone claimed to me that it makes light refract more with decreasing altitude.
Don’t you want to get a handle on basic physics first, before going natural-law-hopping across Wikipedia?
Thanks. You’re right. I mis-interpreted their experiment as written. I’ll try to read it again to see what’s going on and see if it’s explicable.