Cool Physics #10: Michelson-Morley and the Luminiferous Aether

This is a brief overview of the Michelson-Morley experiment, which showed that there was no aether through which light waves would propagate. This experiment was instrumental in the development of modern physics—special relativity in particular.

Thumbnail from Alain Le Rille—shown on wikipedia

[scienceisall]

The aether is real. They just call it a quantum field now. You cannot have “particles” spontaneously create themselves from the background, without the background being made of something. This is all the medium which energy propagates through

[wirebrushproductions]

Sorry, but you got some (quite a few) details wrong. The MMX expected to measure the orbital speed of the earth. Rotational speed was too low to be detected (It's about 470 m/sec). The original experiment was done over a period of less than a week, so changes in orbital direction over 6 months was not an issue. It used the rotation of the earth to change the overall orientation of the apparatus, and used an interval of 6 hours. (This meant that, if the aether wind is vertical at one observation, it would be horizontal at the other.) So, no comparison of velocity between 12-hour observations.
Determination of aether wind velocity and direction was made by rotating the apparatus on its mercury pool, not as you assert. Your characterization of the essential means of detecting the aether at about 09:40 is simply wrong.
In 1887, the existence of the Milky Way Galaxy was unknown, so any movement of the sun through the aether was purely speculative. It could not be ruled out, but there was no reason to think that it existed, and Michelson and Morley would have been astonished if, for instance, the earth's galactic motion (~200 km/sec) had been detected.

Michelson was a firm believer in aether, and it had not occurred to him that there would be no velocity. He viewed the experiment as a failure, not that it demonstrated a lack of aether.
At about 39:20, you discuss the observations in the paper.
Once we get past that, your description is very good.

[baolujiang]

When a car is moving, the air inside is moving with the car, but the air outside the car is not. If you have ever experienced riding a bicycle beside a moving long truck, you certainly know the truck is dragging the air around with it. The Earth is huge, so it is dragging the air with it, no one questions about this fact. Why does the Earth refuse to drag the Aether with it? We need one genius, who can design some experiments to figure out this drag curve(distance to the center of the Earth vs. dragging speed)

[JrgenMonkerud-golg]

even in 1889, fitzgerald proposed physical lenght contraction of the lorentz kind, to account for the null result. try it yourself, impose a lenght contraction of all the matter and potentials in such a way that the lenght of the arms contract in the direction of motion relative to the ether, and you will see that indeed the null result manifests. this is not something einstein found out independently, no way, fitgerald, lorentz and pretty much anyone familiar with the experiment and theories of the ether from 1890 to 1905 knew about the contraction. if you assume time scales emerge from the rate of clocks as they travel through the ether, like a light clock subject to a moving galilean frame relative to the ether and lenght contraction by the known relations, time dilation automatically pops out for processes that are retarded by the same factor because of the mechanisms of their constitution being equivalent to that of light clocks in relation to their time evolution. then you get all of it for free just by assuming the lenght contraction alone as a function of the ether drift relative to you, also it is worth noting that the lenght contraction is simple to derive as a physical consequence of how matter is constituted in the medium, as a consequence of motion. so what special reltivity? is it cool to plagurize everyone and then claim to have done something new, when the coordinate transformations were known, the necessary effects as a function of ether velocity was known, everything that goes into special relativity was know already, what kind of a narcissist goes for that kind of shitty move, just to grandstand on a principle that is only philosophically sensible for a fundamental theory, which special relativity doesnt need to be at all. relationalism which is the motivation for special relativity, only needs to respect the independence on abstract entities with no properties like space, in a final theory, the medium for light and field phenomena can be considered a physical entity, and motion relative to it has no such motivation to be without physical meaning. sure up til not no such effects have been measured, that disagrees with the principle, but there are such effects out there, when you extend the ether theory to superluminal sectors of dynamics. but no lets celebrate nonsense instead.

[terryredbourne]

The experiment merely showed light propagates through the aether at a fairly constant speed no matter the direction. If it didn't, a lot of instrumentation would be messed up. Think anything that measures any em wave. The frequency would cycle all on its own due to constantly changing direction with respect to the aether. Why is this so difficult to comprehend? Therefore, the aether stays! Yay! As for this 'dragging' effect, if this was a 'thing', light wouldn't travel too far at all! Try thinking the opposite way, that there is next to zero drag. This is the only way a light wave could travel such vast distances. Have any of you even attempted to figure out, at the quantum level, how are eye sight works? You will quickly see (lol) light cannot possibly be a packet but a wave. Your eye isn't digital! Let me know if, now that there's an aether, you can't figure out how gravity might (probably) work. Occam's Razor my dudes. Don't assume anything.

[jrngln]

The Mickelson Morley experiment proved that the Earth was stationary not moving, just as the Bible says.

And the Aries experiment proved that it is the luminiferous Aether that moves.

Which is how the sun moon and stars including the wandering Stars rotate around the Dome of the Flat Earth.

May Jehovah bless you in your studies.

[JrgenMonkerud-golg]

the history is false. mmx never disproved an aether, it just proved you needed lenght contraction, because stellar abberation cannot be correctly explained in a comoving medium. the ether isnt one theory, there were hundreds of individual proposals, very few of them seem to be known by a lot of modern people and scientists that just wave their hands and say the ether was disproven. nope, lorentzes conception of the aether is just the same theory as special relativity, but with more ambition to it. and yeah, it has a special frame, but you can take it to be anything, there is a freedome of choice there related to the lorentz symmetry, and yes you can formulare general relativity all the same as an aether theory. the modern myths of the history of physics are just bullshit.