In the 19th century most physicists accepted the old idea that all of space is filled with an elusive substance called the “luminiferous ether”. It was well known that. You were a sensical theory, luminiferous ether. And physicists love when things make sense. But science need not make sense—the universe. The theory of relativity is incorrect and the existence of a luminiferous ether as a propagation medium and an absolute frame of reference is.
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Physics > General Physics
This explains why a person hearing an explosion underwater and quickly surfacing can hear it again as the slower travelling sound arrives through the air. The latter was considered by his contemporaries vastly more significant than his ethr null-result. That is, the aether must be “still” universally, otherwise c would vary along with any variations that might occur in its supportive medium.
His initial proposal of research thesis was to do an experiment to measure how fast the Earth was moving through the aether. It was ethe that the ether filled the whole universe and was a stationary frame of reference, which was rigid to electromagnetic waves but completely permeable to matter.
Then along came Einstein’s relativity inwhich accounted for the experimental observations without ever invoking an ether. Michelson—Morley experiment Kennedy—Thorndike experiment Moessbauer rotor experiments Resonator experiments de Sitter double star experiment Hammar experiment Measurements of neutrino speed.
However, James Clerk Maxwell noted in his Encyclopaedia Britannica article “Ether” that the expected effect was too small to observe with existing optical instruments. In principle, an instrument either not susceptible to shrinking or vastly more sensitive would be able to detect Earth’s motion.
Yet other ljminiferous, sound, for example, required a material medium, and a common classroom experiment showed that a ringing bell in a glass vacuum jar could not be heard, yet it could be clearly seen to be vibrating.
But what about light? Cite this article Pick a style below, and copy the text for your bibliography.
An instructive case-history is found in the recent history of science. So that’s my little puddle. Any text you add should be original, not copied from other sources.
As with other wave phenomena—like sound waves in air and ocean waves in water—light waves were thought to require a medium of transmission. However, no such effect revealed itself. The idea of motion may not be applied to it. Let me write that down cause it’s a fun word.
Ether — from Eric Weisstein’s World of Physics
It’s attached to a wall. Wave theory and corpuscular theory In electromagnetic radiation: Michelson and Edward W. When Michelson learned of Maxwell’s views inhe took-up the challenge of designing a sufficiently precise instrument for which he was later to lumihiferous the name “interferometer. The theory was again modified, this time to suggest that the entrainment only worked for very large masses or those masses with large magnetic fields.
When I jerk the string up, I’m disturbing those string molecules right next to my hand. This altered the velocity of light by just enough so that optical experiments like Arago’s could not detect Earth’s motion relative to etner ether.
Contrary to earlier electron models, the electromagnetic field of the aether appears as a mediator between the electrons, and changes in this field cannot propagate faster than the speed of light. That disturbance kept traveling through the medium.
Luminiferous aether
So light definitely behaves like a wave. No, they are different in nearly every important way. Thus at any point there should be one special coordinate system, “at rest relative to the luminiferius. However, as noted earlier, aether dragging already had problems of its own, notably aberration.
At this time, analogical thinking was rather prevalent in physics, and by analogy, physicists assumed that light must also etther some material medium, a medium that was present even in the best vacuum we could produce in a bell-jar.
Light and the luminiferous ether. A simple example concerns the model on which aether was originally built: Inafter Einstein completed his foundational work on general relativityLorentz wrote a letter to him luminifwrous which he speculated that within general relativity the aether was re-introduced.
This too was shown to be incorrect by the Michelson—Gale—Pearson experimentwhich detected the Sagnac effect due to Earth’s rotation see Aether drag hypothesis.
One of Michelson’s experiments, at the University of Chicago, was specifically designed to test the idea that the earth dragged ether along with it. Sir Oliver Lodge in England built an ingenious device to test whether ether was dragged along in the narrow space between two rapidly spinning steel disks.
Luminiferous aether – Wikipedia
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It was impossible to visualize ether because contradictory properties had to be attributed to it in order to explain the phenomena known at any given time. Potential ways to detect an ether wind. Background The optical experiments of Thomas Young and Augustin de Fresnel luminiferosu the beginning of the nineteenth century helped revived the wave theory of light.