Word: ethers
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...scientific concept of the ether -an all-pervading medium which transmits light and gravitational force-is a nine-lived cat. Supposedly killed off several times, it still keeps pattering around science's pantry. Last week Dr. Herbert Eugene Ives, an astute and merry physicist who works for Bell Telephone Laboratories in Manhattan, gave the old tabby a good strong shot of mathematical adrenalin...
...Michelson and Morley raced two beams of light against each other with an interferometer (a light splitter). The beams were at right angles. Idea was that if the earth, in its revolution around the sun, was actually traveling through a sea of ether, the effect of ether-drag should perceptibly slow up one of the beams. But the two beams finished th-e race practically neck & neck. This looked like a mortal wallop for the ether theory. Einstein's Relativity theories (1905-15) seemed another deadly stroke, for they dispensed with the ether as unnecessary. In the relativistic view...
Professor Dayton Clarence Miller of Cleveland was one of those who refused to give up his ether. He repeated the Michelson-Morley experiment with delicate interferometers floating on pools of mercury, got positive results which convinced him that the earth is in absolute motion, through an ether sea, at a speed of several hundred miles a second. But his findings were not generally accepted...
...together the framework of Relativity, he was fascinated by the Larmor-Lorentz-Fitzgerald theory that when a clock is in motion it slows down slightly-too slightly to be detected by ordinary means. This theory was based on the idea of a fixed frame of reference, such as the ether. Einstein incorporated the theory in the Relativity structure, as a consequence not of absolute motion but of relative motion-that is, of the clock's motion relative to a hypothetical observer. For a long time there was no experimental confirmation of the Larmor-Lorentz-Fitzgerald slowdown. Then, about...
...short and asserted, with equal vehemence, that it would be long. Peering into the New Year they could see through the darkness as far as an election-it will be a lively one, said the New York Times, "in which hard words will scorch the air and the ether, but it will be an election, not a revolution." And although many an editorial writer looked searchingly back on the '30s, no Washington correspondent pointed out that for President Roosevelt it was a historic midnight that marked the end, not of a year, but of a decade...