re: #278 Colère Tueur de Lapin

Theoretical physicists and experimental physicists should probably talk more often. But, they are very different creature and barely speak the same language.

Michelson and Morley were “old school” physicists, who accepted the prevailing model that light was a wave and the Earth was an object, with both moving through the “aether,” an invisible, massless medium that existed apparently only to carry light waves. Their experiment’s null result confounded them, because it seemed to suggest that there was no aether and/or the speed of light was not affected by the motion of its source or the observer.

Einstein realized that, first, there was no aether, and second, as light was massless, it did not need to obey traditional laws of physical motion. He started with the postulate that the speed of light was invariant, and his conclusions about special relativity followed logically from there.

The aether was physicists’ version of phlogiston.