Michelson-Morley Experiment - The Luminiferous Ether, The Michelson Interferometer, The Null Result
albert
In 1887 two American scientists, physicist Albert Michelson and physical chemist Edward Morley, performed an experiment that was designed to detect the motion of Earth through a hypothetical medium known as the luminiferous ether, which was thought to be present throughout space. They made their measurements with a very sensitive optical instrument now called a Michelson interferometer. Their observations showed no indication of movement through the predicted ether. This outcome was unexpected and has become one of the fundamental experimental results in support of the theory of special relativity, developed by Albert Einstein in 1905.
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During the 1800s scientists had become convinced that light was composed of waves, as opposed to a theory that light was made up of particles proposed more than a century earlier by Isaac Newton. They based their belief on experiments that demonstrated phenomena such as interference—the change in intensity caused by mixing two or more beams of light; and diffraction—the fact that bea…
Designing an experiment that would detect the Earth's movement through the ether was a formidable task, requiring the comparison of the speed of light, which was already known to be about 186,300 miles per second (300,000 km/sec) and the speed of the Earth (almost 18 mi or 30 km per sec). Michelson, who excelled in the art and science of measurement, built an instrument to do the job. He ma…
The Michelson-Morley experiment is a perfect example of a null experiment, one in which something that was expected to happen is not observed. The consequences of their observations for the development of physics were profound. Having proven that there could be no stationary ether, physicists tried to advance new theories that would save the ether concept. Michelson himself suggested that the ethe…
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