Cool factoid: The captcha for this comment is "math test."

The Michelson-Morley experiment was a form of null result, in that it showed that the Earth's movement through space did not affect the relative speed of light. That was unexpected. But it would have been the expected result, if the Earth were immobile whilst the rest of the universe moved around it, as thought by many through the Middle Ages.

I cannot recall the name of the experiment, but it is possible to demonstrate that Earth rotates using physical principles: Put water with some suspended particles (whose motion can be detected by reflected light) in a toroidal, transparent, sealed container. Orient it parallel to Earth's equator. Let it sit for awhile. Then, abruptly turn it over (flip the toroid). It will be seen that the water is rotating. This is because in prior equilibrium it rotated along with the Earth, but suddenly its direction of rotation is opposite to the Earth.

Now, imagine that the Michelson-Morley experiment had been performed FIRST. At the time, it would have been interpreted as proof that the Earth does NOT move through space, and that something such as Ptolemaic theory was correct!

The related headline, for one of the online news services, was that the error could just as well mean that the neutrinos went even faster than originally reported!

Speaking of cable connection errors: In one recent production of Goetterdaemmerung (such as in San Francisco last year), the Norns manipulate cables in what appears to be an electronic switching facility. There is a cable problem.

Thank Wotan!

“No such ‘stuff’ as space”?

No such “stuff” as ether, when I went to school.

Wasn't the landmark importance of Michelson-Morley the discovery that light (and other “electromagnetic waves”) needed no medium for their propagation?

In other words, empty space is, indeed, empty — not filled with the theorized but never-observed “ether,” whose putative existence was definitively disproved by this experiment.

In a related bit of history, 2012 is the 40th anniversary of the first "ethernet" device. The name ethernet was derived from the "luminiferous ether" (the "stuff" from Derb's post) which Michelson-Morley disproved the existence of in their famous experiment. The Xerox employees used "ether"net to describe the physical medium (cables) that transported digital signals...as scientists once thought the luminiferous ether transported E-M waves.

This feels like an Episode of "Connections", that great BBC show created/hosted by James Burke. "And that is how Aristotle made the internet possible." (Aristotle first proposed the "ether".)

My college roomie and I used a variation of the M-M experiment to show that interferometry could be used to identify low-frequency vibrations in objects. We had to do a lot of dampening because (as we often joked) if somebody dropped a Tic-Tac on the 3rd floor, we knew about it in our basement lab. Such was the sensitivity of the device we built. We identified a beat frequency from the addition and cancelation of interference patterns which we demonstrated was mathematically linked to the frequency of the vibrating object we positioned on one leg of our M-M device. Our original plan was to use fluid scattering and build a probe-free mini wind tunnel. But the proof of concept was good enough to get us published in the Undergrad Journal of Research in Physics ('94).

Alas, all knowledge of the Michelson-Morley experiment is slowly disappearing into the aether.

(Sorry - couldn't resist that one.)

Ah, Alan Turing. He was one of the key people in winning World War II. He was thanked for his heroics...and for his science that changed all our lives...with torture at the hands of his government, with a government-mandated chemical castration because he was homosexual.

But I am sure Derb thinks that was just fine treatment. Ironic that he would mention dear Alan, who finally committed suicide when he could no longer bear the torment he was enduring from society, since earlier today Derb was mocking the very idea of condemning someone for tormenting a gay man until he offs himself.

Ah, the old Michelson-Morley experiment...I learned about it in the Army!

In 1966, I was at Fort Dix, New Jersey undergoing a stimulating and scary -- but intellectually rather light -- course of study called, "AIT Infantry."

To amuse myself, I had a nifty papebpack book that taught all you could want to know about electronics in a mere three or four hundred pages. (I had the recurring fantasy in my early life that electronics was something you could study by reading. Imagine my surprise when I later learned that there was math involved, too!)

It was a good book, but I didn't really learn much electronics from it. The thing that I really remember, though, was the Michelson-Morley experiment. Those were the days...when guys were guys and gals were gals and profound physics experiments were understandable and fired the imaginations of average guys. (A popular song on the barracks radio that summer was Frank Sinatra's "Strangers in the Night," which was particularly poignant for guys who were not likely to have any exciting romantic encounters in the night -- at least they hoped they wouldn't.)