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The Michelson–Morley experiment was an attempt to measure the motion of the ... The Experiments on the relative motion of the earth and ether have been completed ...
In this theory, the reason that the Michelson–Morley experiment "failed" was that the apparatus contracted in length in the direction of travel. That is, the light was being affected in the "natural" manner by its travel through the aether as predicted, but so was the apparatus itself, cancelling out any difference when measured.
The timeline of luminiferous aether (light-bearing aether) or ether as a medium for propagating electromagnetic radiation begins in the 18th century. The aether was assumed to exist for much of the 19th century—until the Michelson–Morley experiment returned its famous null result.
A big challenge for the Lorentz ether theory was the Michelson–Morley experiment in 1887. According to the theories of Fresnel and Lorentz, a relative motion to an immobile aether had to be determined by this experiment; however, the result was negative.
Hendrik Lorentz and George Francis FitzGerald offered, within the framework of Lorentz ether theory, an explanation of how the Michelson–Morley experiment could have failed to detect motion through the aether.
In the 1887 Michelson–Morley experiment, the round trip distance that the two beams traveled down the precisely equal arms was expected to be made unequal because of the, now deprecated, idea that light is constrained to travel as a mechanical wave at the speed C only in the rest frame of the luminiferous aether.
Albert Abraham Michelson (surname pronunciation anglicized as Michael-son; December 19, 1852 – May 9, 1931) was a German-born American physicist known for his work on measuring the speed of light and especially for the Michelson–Morley experiment.
The Michelson-Morley experiment, along with the blackbody radiator and photoelectric effect, was a key experiment in the development of modern physics, which includes both relativity and quantum theory, the latter of which explains the wave-like nature of light.