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The Michelson–Morley experiment
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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