luminiferous ether Concepts

Big Bang

by Simon Singh · 1 Jan 2004 · 492pp · 149,259 words

provided the medium for conveying light. By the nineteenth century, physicists had proposed that the entire universe was permeated by a substance they termed the luminiferous ether, which somehow acted as a medium for carrying light. This hypothetical substance had to possess some remarkable properties, as pointed out by the great Victorian

…

scientist Lord Kelvin: Now what is the luminiferous ether? It is matter prodigiously less dense than air – millions and millions and millions of times less dense than air. We can form some sort of

…

the electric and magnetic fields as well as light. The dire situation was nicely summarised by the science writer Banesh Hoffmann: First we had the luminiferous ether, Then we had the electromagnetic ether, And now we haven’t e(i)ther. So, by the end of the nineteenth century Michelson had proved

Paradox: The Nine Greatest Enigmas in Physics

by Jim Al-Khalili · 22 Oct 2012 · 208pp · 70,860 words

to light waves. They devised an ingenious experiment—one which they were convinced would be the first to confirm and detect the existence of the luminiferous ether. They began by assuming that the Earth is moving through the ether as it orbits the Sun, which it does at about 100,000 kilometers

…

sound waves from a moving car). Yet at the same time, and unlike sound waves, light does not require a medium to pass through; the luminiferous ether does not exist and light waves can move across truly empty space. So far, so good; no paradox here—and nothing, you might think, in

How Emotions Are Made: The New Science of the Mind and Brain

by Lisa Feldman Barrett · 6 Mar 2017

Michelson won a Nobel Prize in 1907 for disproving a conjecture made by Aristotle, that light travels through empty space via a hypothetical substance called luminiferous ether. His detective work set the stage for Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity. In our case, we’ve cast substantial doubt on the evidence for

…

many examples of scientists who searched fruitlessly for an essence because they used the wrong concept to guide their hypotheses. Firestein gives the example of luminiferous ether, a mysterious substance that was thought to fill the universe so that light would have a medium to move through. The ether was a black

…

/japanese-1. emotions as transactions between people: Lutz 1980; Lutz 1983. [back] 24. catalogued many of the concerns: Russell 1994. [back] 25. hypothetical substance called luminiferous ether: Firestein 2012, 22. [back] 26. in the face, body, and voice: The project began with one intrepid young psychologist, David Cordaro; see heam.info/cordaro

The Power Makers

by Maury Klein · 26 May 2008 · 782pp · 245,875 words

or divided scientists more than this mysterious substance. As described by Augustin-Jean Fresnel, a French physicist who argued that light consisted of waves, the luminiferous ether was a gaslike substance through which both light and solids somehow moved. A French mathematician, Augustin-Louis Cauchy, worked out a mathematical basis for the

The Grand Design

by Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow · 14 Jun 2010 · 124pp · 40,697 words

was considered for a while is that his equations specify the speed of light relative to a previously undetected medium permeating all space, called the luminiferous ether, or for short, simply the ether, which was Aristotle’s term for the substance he believed filled all of the universe outside the terrestrial sphere

…

was “the only substance we are confident of in dynamics. One thing we are sure of, and that is the reality and substantiality of the luminiferous ether.” How can you believe in the ether despite the results of the Michelson-Morley experiment? As we’ve said often happens, people tried to save

When Einstein Walked With Gödel: Excursions to the Edge of Thought

by Jim Holt · 14 May 2018 · 436pp · 127,642 words

of metal? The second concerned “Brownian motion”: Why did pollen particles suspended in water move about in a random zigzag pattern? The third concerned the “luminiferous ether” that was supposed to fill all of space and serve as the medium through which light waves moved, the way sound waves move through air

…

Books London School of Economics Long-Term Capital Management Look magazine Los Alamos National Laboratory Lovelace, Ada Byron Lovelace, Lord Love and Math (Frenkel) Lucretius luminiferous ether Lusitanian circle Luzin, Nikolai MacArthur, General Douglas MacFarquhar, Larissa Mackerel Plaza, The (De Vries) Mackie, J. L. Mac Lane, Saunders Maclean, Donald Major League Baseball

A Short History of Nearly Everything

by Bill Bryson · 5 May 2003 · 654pp · 204,260 words

great ramifications for much of what followed. What Michelson and Morley did, without actually intending to, was undermine a longstanding belief in something called the luminiferous ether, a stable, invisible, weightless, frictionless, and unfortunately wholly imaginary medium that was thought to permeate the universe. Conceived by Descartes, embraced by Newton, and venerated

…

pun intended, exactly) to the very heart of our understanding of the nature of the universe. Not incidentally, it also solved the problem of the luminiferous ether by making it clear that it didn't exist. Einstein gave us a universe that didn't need it. Physicists as a rule are not

Time Travel: A History

by James Gleick · 26 Sep 2016 · 257pp · 80,100 words

light or reduce that number in the slightest. Einstein struggled (“psychic tension”; “all sorts of nervous conflicts”) to make sense of that: to discard the luminiferous ether, to accept the speed of light as absolute. Something else had to give. On a fine bright day in Bern (as he told the story

Tesla: Man Out of Time

by Margaret Cheney · 1 Jan 1981 · 478pp · 131,657 words

thoughts in later life were tending more and more toward a unifying physical theory. He believed that all matter came from a primary substance, the luminiferous ether, which filled all space, and he stoutly maintained that cosmic rays and radio waves sometimes moved more swiftly than light. The younger scientists, most of

The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window Into Human Nature

by Steven Pinker · 10 Sep 2007 · 698pp · 198,203 words

to pry open nature’s black boxes and identify the hidden powers at work. Sometimes the candidates don’t pan out, like phlogiston or the luminiferous ether, but often they do, as with genes, atoms, and tectonic plates. Another limitation of probabilistic theories of causation is that they apply to averages over