23 Facts About Luminiferous aether

Negative outcome of the Michelson–Morley experiment suggested that the Luminiferous aether did not exist, a finding that was confirmed in subsequent experiments through the 1920s.

Luminiferous aether believed heat vibrations to be excited "when a Ray of Light falls upon the Surface of any pellucid Body".

Luminiferous aether wrote, "I do not know what this Aether is", but that if it consists of particles then they must be.

Luminiferous aether failed to detect any parallax, thereby placing a lower limit on the distance to stars.

Luminiferous aether suggested that the absence of longitudinal waves suggested that the aether had negative compressibility.

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Luminiferous aether derived expressions for the dielectric constant and the magnetic permeability in terms of the transverse elasticity and the density of this elastic medium.

Luminiferous aether then equated the ratio of the dielectric constant to the magnetic permeability with a suitably adapted version of Weber and Kohlrausch's result of 1856, and he substituted this result into Newton's equation for the speed of sound.

Luminiferous aether wrote another paper in 1864, entitled "A Dynamical Theory of the Electromagnetic Field", in which the details of the luminiferous medium were less explicit.

That is, the Luminiferous aether must be "still" universally, otherwise c would vary along with any variations that might occur in its supportive medium.

Maxwell himself proposed several mechanical models of Luminiferous aether based on wheels and gears, and George Francis FitzGerald even constructed a working model of one of them.

The only Luminiferous aether which has survived is that which was invented by Huygens to explain the propagation of light.

Contemporary scientists were aware of the problems, but Luminiferous aether theory was so entrenched in physical law by this point that it was simply assumed to exist.

Nevertheless, he was aware of the criticisms, and quoted Lord Salisbury as saying that "Luminiferous aether is little more than a nominative case of the verb to undulate".

Lorentz and FitzGerald offered within the framework of Lorentz ether theory a more elegant solution to how the motion of an absolute Luminiferous aether could be undetectable, but if their equations were correct, the new special theory of relativity could generate the same mathematics without referring to an Luminiferous aether at all.

Key difficulty with Fresnel's Luminiferous aether hypothesis arose from the juxtaposition of the two well-established theories of Newtonian dynamics and Maxwell's electromagnetism.

Maxwell noted in the late 1870s that detecting motion relative to this Luminiferous aether should be easy enough—light travelling along with the motion of the Earth would have a different speed than light travelling backward, as they would both be moving against the unmoving Luminiferous aether.

That is, the light was being affected in the "natural" manner by its travel through the Luminiferous aether as predicted, but so was the apparatus itself, cancelling out any difference when measured.

Contrary to earlier electron models, the electromagnetic field of the Luminiferous aether appears as a mediator between the electrons, and changes in this field cannot propagate faster than the speed of light.

Luminiferous aether declared simultaneity only a convenient convention which depends on the speed of light, whereby the constancy of the speed of light would be a useful postulate for making the laws of nature as simple as possible.

Luminiferous aether corrected some mistakes of Lorentz and proved the Lorentz covariance of the electromagnetic equations.

Luminiferous aether found that the Lorentz transformation must transcend its connection with Maxwell's equations, and must represent the fundamental relations between the space and time coordinates of inertial frames of reference.

Luminiferous aether concluded that "one cannot deny the bearer of these concepts a certain substantiality".

Einstein's use of the word "Luminiferous aether" found little support in the scientific community, and played no role in the continuing development of modern physics.