Luminiferous ether

A scientist s credo might be One measurement is no measurement. Thus, take a few measurements and divine the truth This is an invitation for discussions, worse yet, even disputes among scientists. Science thrives on hypotheses that are either disproven or left to stand in the natural sciences that essentially means experiments are re-mn. Any insufficiency of a model results in a refinement of the existing theory it is rare that a theory completely fails (the nineteenth-century luminiferous ether theory of electromagnetic waves was one such, and cold fusion was a more shortlived case). 

The nature of the ether was a source of wide conjecture. As Young himself had put it, the luminiferous ether pervades the substance of all material... 

In 1887 two American scientists, physicist Albert Michelson and physical chemist Edward Morley, performed an experiment that was designed to detect the motion of Earth through a hypothetical medium known as the luminiferous ether, which was thought to be present throughout space. They made their measurements with a very sensitive optical instrument now called a Michelson interferometer. Their observations showed no indication of movement through the predicted ether. This outcome was unexpected and has become one of the fundamental experimental results in support of the theory of special relativity, developed by Albert Einstein in 1905. 

According to their calculations the Michelson interferometer should have registered a fringe shift of about four-tenths (0.4) of a fringe. Instead, no fringe shift was observed. They were forced to conclude that their experiment had shown that the hypothesis of a stationary, luminiferous ether was not correct. 

Luminiferous ether—hypothetical medium proposed to explain the propagation of light. The Michelson-Morley experiment made it necessary to abandon this hypothesis. 

Eamshaw, W., On the nature of the molecular forces which regulate the constitution of the luminiferous ether, Trans. Camb. Phil. Soc., 7,1842, 97-112. 

Michelson, A. A. (1881). The relative motion of the Earth and the luminiferous ether. 

---