Word: orbiters
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...today in the hatching stage is even more formidable. The weapon, which is being developed and is, as they say, in the portfolio of our scientists and designers, is a fantastic weapon." (U.S. Atomic Physicist Ralph E. Lapp guessed that the Russians might be planning an H-bomb to orbit the earth indefinitely, ready on signal to plunge down on any terrestrial target...
...another useful property: it was presumed to be motionless, and therefore it provided the basic frame of reference from which all motions were measured. A star, for instance, could be said to be moving so many miles per hour through the ether. When the earth swung around its orbit, it moved through the ether too, creating an "ether wind" blowing past...
...Albert A. Michelson and Edward W. Morley tried to measure this ether wind. Their idea was to measure the speed of light (186,000 miles per second) against the speed of the earth's motion on its orbit around the sun (18.5 miles per second). They set up their apparatus, an affair of many mirrors, in a lab in a downtown Cleveland building. Once a day the earth's rotation aligned the apparatus with the earth's path around the sun. If there were an ether wind, the light flashing across their lab floor should be slowed...
...eliminate all possible chance for error, the tests were repeated for a year while the earth completed a trip around its orbit. This allowed for the slight possibility that motion of the solar system as a whole might somehow mask the effect of an ether wind. Still the masers showed no change of frequency...
Last week Professor Townes was satisfied. He announced that his apparatus could easily have detected an ether effect even if the earth were moving on its orbit at only one-thousandth the speed it actually travels. Relativity, he concluded, is on firm ground...