Word: morley
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...more than half a century, textbooks have hailed an 1887 experiment performed by the American scientists Albert A. Michelson and Edward W. Morley as the inspiration for Einstein's 1905 Special Theory of Relativity. The two Americans showed that the speed of light is constant despite the motion of its source, a puzzling result that defied the Newtonian physics of the time, but was later explained by Einstein's equations. Yet was Einstein actually guided toward his epochal achievement by the Michelson-Morley experiment? After combing the Einstein archives at Princeton, Physicist-Historian Gerald Holton concludes that...
Then how did the misconception arise? In part, says Holton, because of Einstein's own generous tributes to Michelson and Morley, whose work-in retrospect-provided the only experimental confirmation of relativity for many years. But most of the blame rests with the scientific community itself. By trying to fit the evolution of one of the most important scientific concepts of the 20th century into a neat logical sequence, Holton says, textbook writers (himself included) have nurtured what he calls the "experimenticist fallacy": the false notion that theory always flows directly from experiment. In the process, he says, they...