What did the Michelson-Morley experiment find?
What did the Michelson-Morley experiment find?
In 1886, Michelson and Morley successfully confirmed Fresnel’s drag coefficient – this result was also considered as a confirmation of the stationary aether concept. This result strengthened their hope of finding the aether wind.
What did Michelson and Morley do?
In 1887 the pair performed what have come to be known as the Michelson-Morley experiments, which failed definitively to detect any “ether-drag” effect on the speed of light measured in various directions relative to the motion of the Earth.
Why was the Michelson-Morley experiment important?
The Michelson-Morley experiment was remarkable in many ways. Not only did it set the stage for Lorentz, Fitzgerald, Poincare, and finally Einstein to establish the mathematical framework that described the propagation of light through space and time, it also marked a turning point for science in the New World.
What did the Michelson-Morley experiment disprove?
Therefore the Michelson-Morley disproves the existance of aether understood as the material medium where the light has a relative velocity zero, or what is the same the medium needed for propagating the electromagnetic waves.
How did Michelson and Morley measure the speed of light?
Michelson and Morley were able to measure the speed of light by looking for interference fringes between the light which had passed through the two perpendicular arms of their apparatus.
How did Michelson measure the speed of light?
Michelson used an 8-sided mirror device that rotates while bouncing light to the reflector and also collecting return light. The speed of the device’s rotation gave a way to compute the time, and he covers how that works. The experiment was successful and the result was within .
How did Michelson discover the speed of light?
In the California mountains he surveyed a 35-km pathway between two mountain peaks, determining the distance to an accuracy of less than 2.5 cm. He made use of a special eight-sided revolving mirror and obtained a value of 299,798 km/sec for the velocity of light.
What did Albert Michelson invent?
Michelson interferometerAlbert A. Michelson / Inventions
What did Michelson win the Nobel Prize for?
The Nobel Prize in Physics 1907 was awarded to Albert Abraham Michelson “for his optical precision instruments and the spectroscopic and metrological investigations carried out with their aid.”
