Some months later, FitzGerald published his conjecture in Science to explain the baffling outcome of the 1887 ether-wind experiment of Michelson and Morley.

The Michelson – Morley experiment compared the time for light to reflect from mirrors in two orthogonal directions.

Box plot of the Michelson – Morley experiment, showing several summary statistics.

The resultant theory copes with experiment better than classical mechanics, e. g. in the Michelson – Morley experiment that supports postulate 2, but also has many surprising consequences.

A diagram of the Michelson – Morley experiment

These are the Michelson – Morley experiment, the Kennedy – Thorndike experiment, and the Ives – Stilwell experiment.

The Michelson – Morley experiment was designed to detect second order effects of the " aether wind " – the motion of the aether relative to the earth.

The interpretation of the null result of the Michelson – Morley experiment is that the round-trip travel time for light is isotropic ( independent of direction ), but the result alone is not enough to discount the theory of the aether or validate the predictions of special relativity.

While the Michelson – Morley experiment showed that the velocity of light is isotropic, it said nothing about how the magnitude of the velocity changed ( if at all ) in different inertial frames.

The Michelson – Morley experiment was used to disprove that light propagated through a luminiferous aether.

* 1887 – Albert Michelson and Edward Morley in their experiment do not detect the ether drift

The Michelson – Morley experiment was performed in 1887 by Albert Michelson and Edward Morley at what is now Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio.

In 1885, Michelson began a collaboration with Edward Morley, spending considerable time and money to confirm with higher accuracy Fizeau's 1851 experiment on Fresnel's drag coefficient, to improve on Michelson's 1881 experiment, and to establish the wavelength of light as a standard of length.

At this time Michelson was professor of physics at the Case School of Applied Science, and Morley was professor of chemistry at Western Reserve University, which shared a campus with the Case School on the eastern edge of Cleveland.

Morley ascribed this breakdown to the intense work of Michelson during the preparation of the experiments.

In 1886, Michelson and Morley successfully confirmed Fresnel's drag coefficient – this result was also considered as a confirmation of the stationary aether concept.

Michelson and Morley and other early experimentalists using interferometric techniques in an attempt to measure the properties of the luminiferous aether, used monochromatic light only for initially setting up their equipment, always switching to white light for the actual measurements.

( Afterward, Michelson and Morley ceased their aether drift measurements and started to use their newly developed technique to establish the wavelength of light as a standard of length.

The Fizeau experiment and its 1886 repetition by Michelson and Morley apparently confirmed the stationary aether with partial aether dragging, and refuted complete aether dragging.

On the other hand, the much more precise Michelson – Morley experiment ( 1887 ) apparently confirmed complete aether dragging and refuted the stationary aether.

As early as 1877, while still serving as an officer in the United States Navy, Michelson started planning a refinement of the rotating-mirror method of Léon Foucault for measuring the speed of light, using improved optics and a longer baseline.

The spectrometer is an adapted version of the classical Michelson interferometer using an optimized optical layout.

The Michelson – Gale – Pearson experiment ( 1925 ) is a modified version of the Michelson-Morley experiment and the Sagnac-Interferometer.

This too was shown to be incorrect by the Michelson – Gale – Pearson experiment, which detected the Sagnac effect due to Earth's rotation ( s. Aether drag hypothesis )

The Michelson spectrograph is similar to the instrument used in the Michelson-Morley experiment.

Albert Abraham Michelson ( December 19, 1852 – May 9, 1931 ) was an American physicist known for his work on the measurement of the speed of light and especially for the Michelson-Morley experiment.

I had a feeling that young Pete Michelson, the most promising intern at Fairview, had something to do with it, too.

During the 1920s, the experiments pioneered by Michelson were repeated by Dayton Miller, who publicly proclaimed positive results on several occasions, although not large enough to be consistent with any known aether theory.

In 1893, the standard metre was first measured with an interferometer by Albert A. Michelson, the inventor of the device and an advocate of using some particular wavelength of light as a standard of length.

Light from the source is split into two beams by a half-silvered mirror, one is reflected off a fixed mirror and one off a moving mirror which introduces a time delay — the Fourier transform spectrometer is just a Michelson interferometer with a movable mirror.

The Cambridge group of Ryle and Vonberg observed the sun at 175 MHz for the first time in mid July 1946 with a Michelson interferometer consisting of two radio antennas with spacings of some tens of meters up to 240 meters.

Fringe pattern produced with a Michelson interferometer using white light.

Michelson was fascinated with the sciences, and the problem of measuring the speed of light in particular.

In 1907, Michelson had the honor of being the first American to receive a Nobel Prize in Physics " for his optical precision instruments and the spectroscopic and metrological investigations carried out with their aid ".

Michelson published his result of 299, 910 ± 50 km / s in 1879 before joining Newcomb in Washington DC to assist with his measurements there.

Michelson died with only 36 of the 233 measurement series completed and the experiment was subsequently beset by geological instability and condensation problems before the result of 299, 774 ± 11 km / s, consistent with the prevailing electro-optic values, was published posthumously in 1935.

Surprised, Michelson repeated the experiment with greater and greater precision over the next years, but continued to find no ability to measure the aether.

Bonanza was set in and around Virginia City, Nevada, where Michelson lived with his parents prior to leaving for the Naval Academy.

New Beast Theater Works in collaboration with High Concept Laboratories produced a " semi-opera " about Michelson, his obsessive work style and its effect on his family life which ran from February 11 to February 26, 2011 in Chicago at The Building Stage.

For example, one year before their famous experiment of 1887, Michelson and Morley ( 1886 ) performed a repeat of the Fizeau experiment of 1851, replacing Fizeau's setup with an even-reflection Sagnac interferometer of such high stability, that even placing a lighted match in the light path did not cause artifactual fringe displacement.

Other forms of lateral shearing interferometer, based on the Jamin, Michelson, Mach – Zehnder, and other interferometer designs, have compensated paths and may be used with white light.

This principle is used by detectors such as LIGO and Virgo, which consist of a Michelson interferometer with a Fabry – Pérot cavity with a length of several kilometers in both arms.