The Michelson-Morley experiment of 1887, regardless of expectations, revealed a null consequence: no impact. The implications had been revolutionary.
Think about being alive within the late 1800s, and fascinated by one of the crucial necessary bodily phenomena within the Universe: mild. Numerous issues that we take with no consideration as we speak had been already identified about it. We knew that mild:
- moved on the pace of sunshine, round 300,000 km/s,
- exhibited wave-like behaviors reminiscent of interference and diffraction,
- and was electromagnetic in nature, with oscillating in-phase electrical and magnetic fields.
We did make an underlying assumption about mild, nevertheless, that wasn’t essentially true: that, like all identified waves, it required a medium to journey via. Similar to water waves required the water, seismic waves required the Earth, and sound waves required the air to journey via, mild was assumed to have a medium as properly, often known as the luminiferous aether.
Since mild was identified to propagate via a vacuum — such because the vacuum of house that separated the Earth from the Solar — it by no means occurred to most that mild didn’t want a medium to propagate via; it was…
