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An excerpt from the:

Introductory

Until a few years ago every known fact about light, electricity, and magnetism was in agreement with the theory of a stationary medium or ether, pervading all space, but offering no resistance to the motion of ponderable matter. This theory of a stagnant ether led to the belief that the absolute velocity of the earth through this medium could be determined by optical and electrical measurements. Thus it was predicted that the time required for a beam of light to pass over a given distance, from a fixed point to a mirror and back, should be different in a path lying in the direction of the earth's motion, and in a path lying at right angles to this line of motion. This prediction was tested in the crucial experiment of Michelson and Morley, who found, in spite of the extreme precision of their method, not the slightest difference in the different paths.


It was also predicted from the ether theory that a charged condenser suspended by a wire would be subject to a torsional effect due to the earth's motion. But the absence of this effect was proved experimentally by Trouton and Noble.

The skill with which these experiments were designed and executed permits no serious doubt as to the accuracy of their results, and we are therefore forced to adopt certain new views of far-reaching importance.

It is true that the results of Michelson and Morley might be simply explained by assuming that the velocity of light depends upon the velocity of its source. Perhaps this assumption has formerly been dismissed without sufficient reason, but recent experimental evidence to which we shall revert seems to prove it untenable.

This possibility being excluded, the only satisfactory explanation of the Michelson-Morley experiment which has been offered is due to Lorentz, who assumed that all bodies in motion are shortened in the line of their motion by an amount which is a simple function of the velocity. This shortening would produce a compensation just sufficient to offset the predicted positive effect in the Michelson-Morley experiment, and would also account for the result obtained by Trouton and Noble. It would not, however, prevent the determination of absolute motion by other analogous experiments which have not yet been tried.

Einstein has gone one step farther. Because of the experiments that we have cited, and because of the failure of every other attempt that has ever been made to determine absolute velocity through space, he concludes that further similar attempts will also fail. In fact he states as a law of nature that absolute uniform translatory motion can be neither measured nor detected.