1887 Michelsons and Morley Experiment
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Background to, and motivation for the experiment
In 1675 a Danish astronomer by the name of Olaf Romer observed that while the moons of Jupiter orbited at a constant rate. As the moons went around the planet a slight variation of time behind the planet was detected, this allowed Romer to calculate the speed of light to an approximate value of 3 x 108 ms-1. Later experiments have been conducted to refine this value, one of these experiments conducted in 1882 was by Albert Michelson.
In 1873 Maxwell belived that any wave needed a medium in order for the wave to propagate. Maxwell believed that space was filled with an invisible, elastic substance with near zero mass called ether. In 1887 Albert Michelson and Edward Morley conducted an experiment in attempt to establish the presence of the ether by finding the speed of the earth through it.
The reasoning behind Maxwells prediction of the speed of light was that light travels through the ether, light is known to be a transverse wave and these are unable to travel through liquid or gas. The speed of any wave was always found depending on two properties of the medium, its density and its elasticity. Maxwell assigned values to these and he calculated the velocity of his waves. His result was very close to the exact speed of light in comparison to recent experiments...