The Michelson–Morley experiment
The most famous failed experiment in the history of physics
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The apparatus rested on a stone slab floating in mercury so it could be rotated without vibration, and it could detect differences of a millionth of a per cent in the speed of light. The null result went unexplained for eighteen years. Einstein resolved it in 1905 by inverting the question: light has the same speed for every observer however they move — and then no ether is needed. Michelson became, in 1907, the first American to win a Nobel Prize in a scientific discipline.
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Physicists believed light travelled through an invisible substance filling all space, called the ether. Two researchers in Cleveland built an instrument sensitive enough to detect the Earth's motion through it. They measured nothing. Again and again, nothing.
Sources
- Michelson & Morley, American Journal of Science 34 (1887)
- Nobelprisen i fysikk 1907: Albert A. Michelson
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