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 created an improved version of the Michelson experiment with more than enough accuracy to detect this hypothetical effect.

( 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.

Roberts ( 2006 ) has pointed out that the primitive data reduction techniques used by Miller and other early experimenters, including Michelson and Morley, were capable of creating apparent periodic signals even when none existed in the actual data.

From 1920 and into 1921 Michelson and Francis G. Pease became the first individuals to measure the diameter of a star other than the Sun.

* Fourier transform spectroscopy, a measurement technique whereby spectra are collected based on measurements of the temporal coherence of a radiative source, using time-domain measurements of the electromagnetic radiation or other type of radiation, including several methods such as the continuous wave Michelson or Fourier transform spectrometer and the pulsed Fourier transform spectrograph

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.

* It is interesting to note that Michelson and Morley ( 1887 ) 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.

The three large main branches are Conservative Laestadianism ( corresponds to the Laestadian Lutheran Church, in North America known to other Laestadians as the " Heidemans " after 20th Century leader Paul A. Heideman ); the Firstborn ( in North America, " Old Apostolic Lutheran Church " (" Esikoinens " to other Laestadian denominations ); and the Rauhan Sana (" the Word of Peace ") group, known in the USA and Canada as the Apostolic Lutheran Church of America ( to other Laestadians, the Michelsons after 20th Century leader Andrew Michelson ).

The modification is to make one arm of the classical Michelson – Morley ( MM ) apparatus shorter than the other one.

In its simplest form, termed, it is useful for quantifying the coherence between two electric fields, as measured in a Michelson or other linear optical interferometer.

Special relativity is thus consistent with the result of the Michelson – Morley experiment, which had not detected a medium of conductance ( or aether ) for light waves unlike other known waves that require a medium ( such as water or air ).

Labeyrie concentrated particularly on the use of " diluted optics " beam combination or " densified pupils " of a similar type but larger scale than those Michelson used for measuring the diameters of stars in the 1920s, in contrast to other astronomical interferometer researchers who generally switched to pupil-plane beam combination in the 1980s and 1990s.

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.

During the early to mid-19th century, significant groups of Oneida migrated to Wisconsin and Ontario as a result of displacement driven by New York State ( Michelson 4 ).

Sonya (" Sophia ") Adler ( died 1886 ), born Sonya Oberlander, early stage name Sonya Michelson, was one of the first women to perform in Yiddish theater in Imperial Russia.

Important early experiments confirming special relativity as mentioned above were the Fizeau experiment, the Michelson – Morley experiment, the Kaufmann – Bucherer – Neumann experiments, the Trouton – Noble experiment, the Experiments of Rayleigh and Brace, and the Trouton – Rankine experiment.

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.

In 1921 Albert A. Michelson made the first measurements of a stellar diameter using an interferometer on the Hooker telescope.

The coherence length can be measured using a Michelson interferometer and is the optical path length difference of a self-interfering laser beam which corresponds to a fringe visibility, where the fringe visibility is defined as

If the aether were stationary relative to the Sun, Michelson expected ( using his incorrect formula ) that the Earth's motion would produce a fringe shift 4 % the size of a single fringe of yellow light.

Fringe pattern produced with a Michelson interferometer using white light.

From 1920, Michelson started planning a definitive measurement from the Mount Wilson Observatory, using a baseline to Lookout Mountain, a prominent bump on the south ridge of Mount San Antonio ( Old Baldy ), some 22 miles distant.

Colored and monochromatic fringes in a Michelson interferometer: ( a ) White light fringes where the two beams differ in the number of phase inversions ; ( b ) White light fringes where the two beams have experienced the same number of phase inversions ; ( c ) Fringe pattern using monochromatic light ( Fraunhofer lines | sodium D lines )

In 1935, Gustaf Wilhelm Hammar disproved a theoretical challenge to special relativity that attempted to explain away the null results of Michelson – Morley – type experiments as being a mere artifact of aether-dragging, using an odd-reflection Sagnac interferometer.

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

: 1881 – Albert Abraham Michelson publishes his first interferometer experiments, using the device for the measurement of extremely small distances.

After several more successes in Odessa, most notably a production of Breindele Cossack starring Jacob Adler and Sonya Oberlander ( then performing under the name Sonya Michelson ), their run was cut short by the news that Goldfaden, whose plays they were using without permission, was coming with his troupe to Odessa, and that he had booked the Remesleni Club out from under them.

It produced the two Cambridge catalogues of radio sources ( the 2C catalogue of radio sources at 81. 5 MHz, and the 3C catalogue of radio sources at 159 MHz, building on the work of the Preliminary survey of the radio stars in the Northern Hemisphere at 45 MHz-214 MHz using the 2-element Long Michelson Interferometer ), discovering some of the most interesting astronomical objects known.

Albert Abraham Michelson Albert Abraham Michelson ( 1881 ) tried to measure the relative motion of earth and Aether ( Aether-Wind ), as it was expected in Fresnel ’ s theory, by using an interferometer.