Week 6, clip 3

Timepoint:  10:34.7

1) The Michelson-Morley experiment definitively proved that the aether did not exist in its proposed basic form.  The expected periodic pattern is shown at 1/8th scale on the Wikipedia page in Figure 7, relative to the actual measurements.  This result was obtained after extraordinary experimental effort, and was the most famous of ~15 experiments performed over a period of 50 years (1881-1930), none of which was able to reject the non-existence of the aether.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michelson-Morley_experiment#Michelson.E2.80.93Morley_experiment_.281887.29

A copy of the original paper can be found here:  http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/14786448708628130