Albert Michelson

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Big Bang by Simon Singh

Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, All science is either physics or stamp collecting, Andrew Wiles, anthropic principle, Arthur Eddington, Astronomia nova, Bletchley Park, Boeing 747, Brownian motion, carbon-based life, Cepheid variable, Chance favours the prepared mind, Charles Babbage, Commentariolus, Copley Medal, cosmic abundance, cosmic microwave background, cosmological constant, cosmological principle, dark matter, Dava Sobel, Defenestration of Prague, discovery of penicillin, Dmitri Mendeleev, Eddington experiment, Edmond Halley, Edward Charles Pickering, Eratosthenes, Ernest Rutherford, Erwin Freundlich, Fellow of the Royal Society, Ford Model T, fudge factor, Hans Lippershey, Harlow Shapley and Heber Curtis, Harvard Computers: women astronomers, heat death of the universe, Henri Poincaré, horn antenna, if you see hoof prints, think horses—not zebras, Index librorum prohibitorum, information security, invention of the telescope, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, Karl Jansky, Kickstarter, Louis Daguerre, Louis Pasteur, luminiferous ether, Magellanic Cloud, Murray Gell-Mann, music of the spheres, Olbers’ paradox, On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, Paul Erdős, retrograde motion, Richard Feynman, scientific mainstream, Simon Singh, Stephen Hawking, Strategic Defense Initiative, the scientific method, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, time dilation, unbiased observer, Wilhelm Olbers, William of Occam

We believe it is a real thing, with great rigidity in comparison with its density: it may be made to vibrate 400 million million times per second; and yet be of such density as not to produce the slightest resistance to any body going through it. In other words, the ether was incredibly strong, yet strangely insubstantial. It was also transparent, frictionless and chemically inert. It was all around us, yet it was clearly hard to identify because nobody had ever seen it, grabbed it or bumped into it. Nevertheless, Albert Michelson, America’s first Nobel Laureate in physics, believed that he could prove its existence. Michelson’s Jewish parents had fled persecution in Prussia in 1854, when he was just two years old. He grew up and studied in San Francisco before going on to join the US Naval Academy, where he graduated a lowly twenty-fifth in seamanship, but top in optics.

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One swims directly across the river to the closest point on the opposite bank, then turns around and swims back. The other stays on one side of the river, swimming downstream a distance (measured along the bank) exactly equal to the width of the river, then swims back to the start. Who wins? [See Figure 20 for the solution.] Figure 20 Albert Michelson used this swimming puzzle to explain his ether experiment. The two swimmers play the same role as the two beams of light heading in perpendicular directions, then both returning to the same starting point. One swims first with and then against the current, while the other swims across the current – just as one light beam travels with and against the ether wind, and the other across it.

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Civilisation is but a huge mutual insurance company against human selfishness.’ Edwin resolved the conflict between his own ambition and his father’s pragmatism by formally studying law to pacify his father, while also completing enough courses in physics to keep alive his dream of becoming an astronomer. The Chicago physics department was headed by Albert Michelson, who had dispensed with the ether and won America’s first Nobel Prize for Physics in 1907. The university was also home to Robert Millikan, who would go on to become America’s second Nobel Laureate in physics, and who took on Hubble as his part-time laboratory assistant while Edwin was still an undergraduate.

Paradox: The Nine Greatest Enigmas in Physics by Jim Al-Khalili

Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, anthropic principle, Arthur Eddington, butterfly effect, clockwork universe, complexity theory, dark matter, Edmond Halley, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, Ernest Rutherford, Henri Poincaré, Higgs boson, invention of the telescope, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, Laplace demon, Large Hadron Collider, luminiferous ether, Magellanic Cloud, Olbers’ paradox, Pierre-Simon Laplace, Schrödinger's Cat, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, The Present Situation in Quantum Mechanics, time dilation, Wilhelm Olbers

It was labeled the luminiferous (“light-carrying”) ether and a major effort was made to prove its existence. Of course, it had to have certain properties: for instance, it had to permeate the whole galaxy in order for distant starlight to reach us through the vacuum of space. In 1887, at a college in Ohio, two American physicists, Albert Michelson and Edward Morley, conducted one of the most famous experiments in the history of science. They had devised a method for measuring very accurately the time it takes for a light beam to cover a fixed distance. But before I describe what they found, there is another property of waves that I need to mention, which is that the speed at which waves travel does not depend on how fast their source is moving.

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Surely, as I explained before, you see the passenger moving at walking pace while the platform observer sees him whizz past at train speed, plus a little more. Just eight years before Michelson and Morley achieved their disturbing finding, Albert Einstein had been born in Ulm in Germany. That same year, 1879, Albert Michelson, working at a U.S. Naval Observatory in Washington, had measured the speed of light to an accuracy of about one part in ten thousand. He wasn’t the first to do this and would not be the last, but it would stand him in good stead when he and Morley conducted their famous experiment. As for the young Einstein, although of course he was completely unaware of the astonishing result that Michelson and Morley announced to the world, he was nevertheless soon pondering the unusual properties of light himself by devising imaginary experiments.

A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson

Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, Alfred Russel Wallace, All science is either physics or stamp collecting, Apollo 11, Arthur Eddington, Barry Marshall: ulcers, Brownian motion, California gold rush, Cepheid variable, clean water, Copley Medal, cosmological constant, dark matter, Dava Sobel, David Attenborough, double helix, Drosophila, Eddington experiment, Edmond Halley, Ernest Rutherford, Fellow of the Royal Society, flying shuttle, Gregor Mendel, Harvard Computers: women astronomers, Helicobacter pylori, Higgs boson, Isaac Newton, it's over 9,000, James Watt: steam engine, John Harrison: Longitude, Kevin Kelly, Kuiper Belt, Large Hadron Collider, Louis Pasteur, luminiferous ether, Magellanic Cloud, Menlo Park, Murray Gell-Mann, out of africa, Richard Feynman, Stephen Hawking, supervolcano, Thomas Malthus, Wilhelm Olbers

Undaunted—well, perhaps mildly daunted—Planck turned to other matters.*16 We shall turn to these ourselves in a moment, but first we must make a slight (but relevant!) detour to Cleveland, Ohio, and an institution then known as the Case School of Applied Science. There, in the 1880s, a physicist of early middle years named Albert Michelson, assisted by his friend the chemist Edward Morley, embarked on a series of experiments that produced curious and disturbing results that would have 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.

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Thomson was insisting: “The ether is not a fantastic creation of the speculative philosopher; it is as essential to us as the air we breathe”—this more than four years after it was pretty incontestably established that it didn't exist. People, in short, were really attached to the ether. If you needed to illustrate the idea of nineteenth-century America as a land of opportunity, you could hardly improve on the life of Albert Michelson. Born in 1852 on the German–Polish border to a family of poor Jewish merchants, he came to the United States with his family as an infant and grew up in a mining camp in California's gold rush country, where his father ran a dry goods business. Too poor to pay for college, he traveled to Washington, D.C., and took to loitering by the front door of the White House so that he could fall in beside President Ulysses S.

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At a single high school track meet in 1906, he won the pole vault, shot put, discus, hammer throw, standing high jump, and running high jump, and was on the winning mile-relay team—that is seven first places in one meet—and came in third in the broad jump. In the same year, he set a state record for the high jump in Illinois. As a scholar he was equally proficient, and had no trouble gaining admission to study physics and astronomy at the University of Chicago (where, coincidentally, the head of the department was now Albert Michelson). There he was selected to be one of the first Rhodes scholars at Oxford. Three years of English life evidently turned his head, for he returned to Wheaton in 1913 wearing an Inverness cape, smoking a pipe, and talking with a peculiarly orotund accent—not quite British but not quite not—that would remain with him for life.

The Loop: How Technology Is Creating a World Without Choices and How to Fight Back by Jacob Ward

2021 United States Capitol attack, 4chan, Abraham Wald, AI winter, Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, Amazon Mechanical Turk, assortative mating, autonomous vehicles, availability heuristic, barriers to entry, Bayesian statistics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Black Swan, blockchain, Broken windows theory, call centre, Cass Sunstein, cloud computing, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark matter, data science, deep learning, Donald Trump, drone strike, endowment effect, George Akerlof, George Floyd, hindsight bias, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jeffrey Epstein, license plate recognition, lockdown, longitudinal study, Lyft, mandelbrot fractal, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, natural language processing, non-fungible token, nudge unit, OpenAI, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, pattern recognition, QAnon, RAND corporation, Richard Thaler, Robert Shiller, selection bias, self-driving car, seminal paper, shareholder value, smart cities, social contagion, social distancing, Steven Levy, survivorship bias, TikTok, Turing test

And if it were moving across an aether, that aether should give off some sort of wind, and Earth’s movement should be affected depending on whether the Earth was traveling with that wind or against it. And as these granular questions became a priority, cutting-edge experiments began to reveal that generations of scientists had been entirely, embarrassingly wrong. Between April and July 1887, a pair of American physicists, Albert Michelson and Edward Morley, conducted experiments on the outskirts of Cleveland at what is now Case Western Reserve University. Michelson had prototyped the interferometer they’d be using for the work while doing research for the navy, and spent most of the prior few years laboring so relentlessly toward the goal of detecting aether wind that he’d had a nervous breakdown in 1885.

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With the idea of a constant medium no longer workable, old theories collapsed, new theories were necessary, and a physicist born in Germany just a few years before Michelson and Morley emerged disappointed from their basement lab came up with the best theory around. In 1931, long after he’d achieved fame for his scientific achievements, Albert Einstein met Albert Michelson for the first and only time at a dinner in Einstein’s honor at Caltech. According to his biographer Albrecht Fölsing, Einstein gave an after-dinner speech for a crowd of two hundred that included the aging physicist, and thanked Michelson directly for the work he had done when Einstein “was still a little boy, hardly three feet high.”

Coming of Age in the Milky Way by Timothy Ferris

Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, Alfred Russel Wallace, anthropic principle, Arthur Eddington, Atahualpa, Cepheid variable, classic study, Commentariolus, cosmic abundance, cosmic microwave background, cosmological constant, cosmological principle, dark matter, delayed gratification, Eddington experiment, Edmond Halley, Eratosthenes, Ernest Rutherford, Garrett Hardin, Gary Taubes, Gregor Mendel, Harlow Shapley and Heber Curtis, Harvard Computers: women astronomers, Henri Poincaré, invention of writing, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, John Harrison: Longitude, Karl Jansky, Lao Tzu, Louis Pasteur, Magellanic Cloud, mandelbrot fractal, Menlo Park, Murray Gell-Mann, music of the spheres, planetary scale, retrograde motion, Richard Feynman, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Searching for Interstellar Communications, source of truth, Stephen Hawking, Thales of Miletus, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, time dilation, Wilhelm Olbers

Time: 1877 Noteworthy Events: David Gill measures parallax of Mars during its opposition, deduces distance to the sun of ninety-three million miles. Time: 1879 Noteworthy Events: Albert Michelson, employing Foucault’s principle, determines velocity of light. Time: 1883 Noteworthy Events: Henry Rowland’s diffraction grating greatly improves the resolution of spectrographs. Time: 1884 Noteworthy Events: Johann Balmer determines harmonic sequence of hydrogen lines, initiating line of inquiry that will lead to investigation of the electron shells of atoms. Time: 1887 Noteworthy Events: Albert Michelson and Edward Morley perform the final and most precise in a series of experiments showing that space cannot be filled with the aether that had been thought to be responsible for transmitting light.

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.* To measure this “aether drift”—as it was called, though what was thought to be drifting was not the aether but the earth—would of course be a delicate matter, since the velocity of the earth amounts to but a tiny fraction of the velocity of light. But by the latter part of the nineteenth century, technology had advanced to a sufficient degree of precision to make the task feasible. The critical experiment was conducted in the 1880s by the physicist Albert Michelson (who devoted his career to the study of light, he said, “because it’s so much fun”) and the chemist Edward Morley. Aether drift theory held that if the velocity of light was constant relative to a stationary, all-pervading aether, then when the earth in its orbit was moving away from star A and toward star B, the observed speed of the light coming from star ?

The Grand Design by Stephen Hawking, Leonard Mlodinow

airport security, Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, anthropic principle, Arthur Eddington, Buckminster Fuller, conceptual framework, cosmic microwave background, cosmological constant, dark matter, fudge factor, invention of the telescope, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, John Conway, John von Neumann, Large Hadron Collider, luminiferous ether, Mercator projection, Richard Feynman, Stephen Hawking, Thales of Miletus, the scientific method, Turing machine

Maxwell was talked out of publishing his idea in Proceedings of the Royal Society by its editor, who didn’t think the experiment would work. But in 1879, shortly before he died at age forty-eight of painful stomach cancer, Maxwell sent a letter on the subject to a friend. The letter was published posthumously in the journal Nature, where it was read by, among others, an American physicist named Albert Michelson. Inspired by Maxwell’s speculation, in 1887 Michelson and Edward Morley carried out a very sensitive experiment designed to measure the speed at which the earth travels through the ether. Their idea was to compare the speed of light in two different directions, at right angles. If the speed of light were a fixed number relative to the ether, the measurements should have revealed light speeds that differed depending on the direction of the beam.

The Fabric of the Cosmos by Brian Greene

airport security, Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, Arthur Eddington, Brownian motion, clockwork universe, conceptual framework, cosmic microwave background, cosmological constant, dark matter, dematerialisation, Eddington experiment, Hans Lippershey, Henri Poincaré, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Large Hadron Collider, luminiferous ether, Murray Gell-Mann, power law, quantum entanglement, Richard Feynman, seminal paper, Stephen Hawking, time dilation, urban renewal

Indeed, with the successful incorporation of electricity and magnetism, there was a growing sense that theoretical physics would soon be complete. Physics, some suggested, was rapidly becoming a finished subject and its laws would shortly be chiseled in stone. In 1894, the renowned experimental physicist Albert Michelson remarked that “most of the grand underlying principles have been firmly established” and he quoted an “eminent scientist”—most believe it was the British physicist Lord Kelvin—as saying that all that remained were details of determining some numbers to a greater number of decimal places.1 In 1900, Kelvin himself did note that “two clouds” were hovering on the horizon, one to do with properties of light’s motion and the other with aspects of the radiation objects emit when heated,2 but there was a general feeling that these were mere details, which, no doubt, would soon be addressed.

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For example, if you swim through water toward an oncoming water wave, the wave approaches you more quickly; if you swim away from the wave, it approaches you more slowly. Similarly, if you move through the supposed aether toward or away from an oncoming light wave, the light wave’s approach should, by the same reasoning, be faster or slower than 670 million miles per hour. In 1887, however, when Albert Michelson and Edward Morley measured the speed of light, time and time again they found exactly the same speed of 670 million miles per hour regardless of their motion or that of the light’s source. All sorts of clever arguments were devised to explain these results. Maybe, some suggested, the experimenters were unwittingly dragging the aether along with them as they moved.

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Imagine that we live on a three-brane that surrounds a region with four space dimensions (much as the two-dimensional skin of an apple surrounds the apple’s three-dimensional interior). The holographic principle in this setting would say that our three-dimensional perceptions would be the shadows of four-dimensional physics taking place in the region surrounded by our brane. Notes Chapter 1 1. Lord Kelvin was quoted by the physicist Albert Michelson during his 1894 address at the dedication of the University of Chicago’s Ryerson Laboratory (see D. Kleppner, Physics Today, November 1998). 2. Lord Kelvin, “Nineteenth Century Clouds over the Dynamical Theory of Heat and Light,” Phil. Mag. Ii—6th series, 1 (1901). 3. A. Einstein, N. Rosen, and B.

A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking

Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, anthropic principle, Apple Newton, Arthur Eddington, bet made by Stephen Hawking and Kip Thorne, Brownian motion, cosmic microwave background, cosmological constant, dark matter, Eddington experiment, Edmond Halley, Ernest Rutherford, Henri Poincaré, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, Magellanic Cloud, Murray Gell-Mann, Richard Feynman, Stephen Hawking

In particular, as the earth was moving through the ether on its orbit round the sun, the speed of light measured in the direction of the earth’s motion through the ether (when we were moving toward the source of the light) should be higher than the speed of light at right angles to that motion (when we are not moving toward the source). In 1887 Albert Michelson (who later became the first American to receive the Nobel Prize for physics) and Edward Morley carried out a very careful experiment at the Case School of Applied Science in Cleveland. They compared the speed of light in the direction of the earth’s motion with that at right angles to the earth’s motion.

Zero: The Biography of a Dangerous Idea by Charles Seife

Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, Arthur Eddington, Cepheid variable, cosmological constant, dark matter, Eddington experiment, Edmond Halley, Georg Cantor, heat death of the universe, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, John Conway, machine readable, Pierre-Simon Laplace, place-making, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, retrograde motion, Richard Feynman, Stephen Hawking

For an observer approaching the boy, the stones seem to be going faster than for an observer who is running away; the velocity of the stones seems to depend on your direction and speed. In the same way, the speed of light should depend on whether you are running toward or running away from the lightbulb that’s shining on you. In 1887 the American physicists Albert Michelson and Edward Morley tried to measure this effect. They were baffled when they found no difference; the speed of light was the same in every direction. How could this be? Again, it was the young Einstein who had the answer in 1905. And again, very simple assumptions would have enormous consequences.

The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World by David Deutsch

agricultural Revolution, Albert Michelson, anthropic principle, Apollo 13, artificial general intelligence, Bonfire of the Vanities, Charles Babbage, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, cosmological principle, dark matter, David Attenborough, discovery of DNA, Douglas Hofstadter, Easter island, Eratosthenes, Ernest Rutherford, first-past-the-post, Georg Cantor, global pandemic, Gödel, Escher, Bach, illegal immigration, invention of movable type, Isaac Newton, Islamic Golden Age, Jacquard loom, Johannes Kepler, John Conway, John von Neumann, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Kenneth Arrow, Loebner Prize, Louis Pasteur, mirror neurons, Nick Bostrom, pattern recognition, Pierre-Simon Laplace, precautionary principle, Richard Feynman, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, seminal paper, Stephen Hawking, supervolcano, technological singularity, Thales of Miletus, The Coming Technological Singularity, the scientific method, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, Turing test, Vernor Vinge, Whole Earth Review, William of Occam, zero-sum game

Trying to know the unknowable leads inexorably to error and self-deception. Among other things, it creates a bias towards pessimism. For example, in 1894 the physicist Albert Michelson made the following prophecy about the future of physics: The more important fundamental laws and facts of physical science have all been discovered, and these are now so firmly established that the possibility of their ever being supplanted in consequence of new discoveries is exceedingly remote…Our future discoveries must be looked for in the sixth place of decimals. Albert Michelson, address at the opening of the Ryerson Physical Laboratory, University of Chicago, 1894 What exactly was Michelson doing when he judged that there was only an ‘exceedingly remote’ chance that the foundations of physics as he knew them would ever be superseded?

Strange New Worlds: The Search for Alien Planets and Life Beyond Our Solar System by Ray Jayawardhana

Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, Arthur Eddington, Boeing 747, cosmic abundance, dark matter, Donald Davies, Eddington experiment, Edmond Halley, fake news, invention of the telescope, Isaac Newton, James Webb Space Telescope, Johannes Kepler, Kuiper Belt, Late Heavy Bombardment, Louis Pasteur, Neil Armstrong, Pierre-Simon Laplace, planetary scale, Pluto: dwarf planet, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, seminal paper

When you see an array of shimmering rainbow colors on a puddle in the street, you’re seeing the result of interference, the cancellation of light waves on a thin flm of oil on the water’s surface. Even though optical interferometry is only now coming of age, its origins date back nearly a century to the efforts of Albert Michelson. Best known for measuring the speed of light, he won a Nobel Prize in Physics in 1907. Michelson knew that the angular resolution of a telescope—its ability to distinguish two stars that appear very close to each other—depended only on the size of the primary lens or mirror. If we double the size, we double the resolution.

Stephen Hawking by Leonard Mlodinow

Albert Michelson, cosmic microwave background, cosmological constant, cosmological principle, dark matter, Dmitri Mendeleev, do what you love, Ernest Rutherford, Eyjafjallajökull, Isaac Newton, Murray Gell-Mann, Nelson Mandela, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, Stephen Hawking, the scientific method

Physicists in the late nineteenth century were so confident about their theories that in April 1900, Lord Kelvin, one of the most famous scientists of the day, gave a speech about the future of physics in which he implied that all that was left to finish the “physicist’s job” was to clear up two clouds in an otherwise clear blue sky. One of those clouds was an experiment on the speed of light by American physicists Albert Michelson and Edward Morley. The other was a phenomenon called blackbody radiation. These were just little anomalies that we’d soon explain within our existing framework of ideas, Kelvin believed. As it turned out, instead of viewing those issues as two little clouds in a blue sky, it would have been more accurate to envision two massive icebergs confronting a ship in the ocean.

From eternity to here: the quest for the ultimate theory of time by Sean M. Carroll

Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, anthropic principle, Arthur Eddington, Brownian motion, cellular automata, Claude Shannon: information theory, Columbine, cosmic microwave background, cosmological constant, cosmological principle, dark matter, dematerialisation, double helix, en.wikipedia.org, gravity well, Great Leap Forward, Harlow Shapley and Heber Curtis, heat death of the universe, Henri Poincaré, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, Lao Tzu, Laplace demon, Large Hadron Collider, lone genius, low earth orbit, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, pets.com, Pierre-Simon Laplace, Richard Feynman, Richard Stallman, Schrödinger's Cat, Slavoj Žižek, Stephen Hawking, stochastic process, synthetic biology, the scientific method, time dilation, wikimedia commons

To check that, we’ll allow you to remove the curtains from the windows and let some light come in from the outside world. When you measure the velocity of the light that was emitted by some outside source, once again you find that it doesn’t depend on the velocity of your own spaceship. A real-world version of this experiment was performed in 1887 by Albert Michelson and Edward Morley. They didn’t have a spaceship with a powerful rocket, so they used the next best thing: the motion of the Earth around the Sun. The Earth’s orbital velocity is about 30 kilometers per second, so in the winter it has a net velocity of about 60 kilometers per second different from its velocity in the summer, when it’s moving in the other direction.

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measurement. See also observation Méchanique Céleste (Laplace) medium, time as memory and cause and effect and cognitive instability and life and Maxwell’s Demon and physicality of information and possibilism and remembering the future mesons Messier, Charles Michell, John Michelson, Albert Michelson-Morley experiment microstates and arrow of time and black holes and closed timelike curves and coarse-graining counting and directionality of time and empty space and entropy and evolution of space of states and inflationary cosmology and memory and mixing and possibilism and Principle of Indifference and statistical mechanics and string theory and time asymmetry microwave background radiation.

Time Travel: A History by James Gleick

Ada Lovelace, Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, Arthur Eddington, augmented reality, butterfly effect, Charles Babbage, crowdsourcing, Doomsday Book, Eddington experiment, index card, Isaac Newton, John von Neumann, luminiferous ether, Marshall McLuhan, Norbert Wiener, pattern recognition, Plato's cave, pneumatic tube, Richard Feynman, Schrödinger's Cat, self-driving car, Stephen Fry, Stephen Hawking, telepresence, The future is already here, time dilation, Wayback Machine, wikimedia commons

Those light waves, for example—so clearly waves, according to the mathematics, but waves in what? Sound needs air or water or other substance to carry the vibrations. Light waves likewise implied an unseen medium, the so-called ether—“luminiferous,” or light bearing. Naturally experimentalists were trying to detect this ether, with no success. Albert Michelson and Edward Morley came up with a clever experiment in 1887 to measure the difference between the speed of light in the direction of the earth’s motion and the speed of light at right angles to it. They couldn’t find any difference at all. Was the ether necessary? Or was it possible to think purely of an electrodynamics of moving bodies, through empty space?

Whiplash: How to Survive Our Faster Future by Joi Ito, Jeff Howe

3D printing, air gap, Albert Michelson, AlphaGo, Amazon Web Services, artificial general intelligence, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Black Swan, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Burning Man, business logic, buy low sell high, Claude Shannon: information theory, cloud computing, commons-based peer production, Computer Numeric Control, conceptual framework, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data acquisition, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, digital rights, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, double helix, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Ferguson, Missouri, fiat currency, financial innovation, Flash crash, Ford Model T, frictionless, game design, Gerolamo Cardano, informal economy, information security, interchangeable parts, Internet Archive, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, John Harrison: Longitude, Joi Ito, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Mark Zuckerberg, microbiome, move 37, Nate Silver, Network effects, neurotypical, Oculus Rift, off-the-grid, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), PalmPilot, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, pirate software, power law, pre–internet, prisoner's dilemma, Productivity paradox, quantum cryptography, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, Ronald Coase, Ross Ulbricht, Satoshi Nakamoto, self-driving car, SETI@home, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Simon Singh, Singularitarianism, Skype, slashdot, smart contracts, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Stuxnet, supply-chain management, synthetic biology, technological singularity, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Nature of the Firm, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, the strength of weak ties, There's no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home - Ken Olsen, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Two Sigma, universal basic income, unpaid internship, uranium enrichment, urban planning, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Wayback Machine, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler

We’ve learned that we can’t command or control the weather, and in fact we’ve had limited success controlling complex systems of our own making, be that protecting sensitive networks from cyber attacks or using monetary policy to influence the markets. If there is one thing on which the otherwise disparate researchers, scientists, and thinkers throughout this book might agree, it’s that we are only now learning enough to discover just how little we know. It’s difficult to believe that in 1894 the Nobel Prize–winning physicist Albert Michelson could say that “it seems probable that most of the grand underlying [scientific] principles have been firmly established.”15 All that remained, he seemed to believe, would be to tie up a few loose ends. Within thirty years the theory of relativity would render all such statements absurd displays of hubris.

Wonders of the Universe by Brian Cox, Andrew Cohen

a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, Apollo 11, Arthur Eddington, California gold rush, Cepheid variable, cosmic microwave background, dark matter, Dmitri Mendeleev, Eddington experiment, Eyjafjallajökull, Ford Model T, heat death of the universe, Higgs boson, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Johannes Kepler, Karl Jansky, Large Hadron Collider, Magellanic Cloud, Mars Rover, Neil Armstrong, Stephen Hawking, the scientific method, time dilation, trade route

Betelgeuse has long been familiar to stargazers, notable for its brightness and reddish tinge that is clearly visible to the naked eye. Sir John Herschel studied the star intensely in the nineteenth century, recording the dramatic variations in its brightness. However, it was only when three astronomers from the Mount Wilson Observatory in California tried to measure its diameter that we realised this was no ordinary star. Albert Michelson, Francis Pease and John Anderson used a specially designed telescope to measure the scale of this red star using a technique known as interferometry. By measuring the angular diameter (the apparent size of an object from our position on Earth), they came up with a number that, although it’s been refined since, revealed something profound: Betelgeuse is a true giant in every sense.

Collider by Paul Halpern

Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, anthropic principle, cosmic microwave background, cosmological constant, dark matter, Dr. Strangelove, Ernest Rutherford, Gary Taubes, gravity well, Herman Kahn, Higgs boson, horn antenna, index card, Isaac Newton, Large Hadron Collider, Magellanic Cloud, pattern recognition, Plato's cave, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Strategic Defense Initiative, time dilation

Many nineteenth-century physicists believed in a dilute substance, called ether, filling all of space and serving as the conduit for luminous vibrations. One prediction of that hypothesis is that light’s measured speed should vary with the direction of the ether wind. A famous 1887 experiment by American researchers Albert Michelson and Edward Morley disproved the ether hypothesis by showing that the speed of light is the same in all directions. Still, given the compelling analogy to material waves, it was hard for the scientific community to accept that light is able to move through sheer emptiness. The constancy of the speed of light in a vacuum raised another critical question.

Exoplanets by Donald Goldsmith

Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, Carrington event, Colonization of Mars, cosmic abundance, dark matter, Dava Sobel, en.wikipedia.org, Great Leap Forward, Isaac Newton, James Webb Space Telescope, Johannes Kepler, Kickstarter, Kuiper Belt, Magellanic Cloud, Mars Rover, megastructure, Pluto: dwarf planet, race to the bottom, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Stephen Hawking, time dilation

As we have seen, in vis­i­ble light stars typically outshine their planets by a f­ actor of a billion or so, whereas in the infrared this number diminishes a thousandfold, to about a million. On the other hand, vis­i­ble light offers much richer possibilities for examining a planet without overwhelming interference from the star nearby. Optical interferometry does exist and has demonstrated its usefulness ever since Albert Michelson, the first American to win the Nobel prize in physics, employed an interferometer at the 100-­ inch reflecting telescope at the Mount Wilson Observatory in Cali­fornia to make the first mea­sure­ment of a star’s dia­meter—in this case, the red supergiant Betelgeuse in Orion’s shoulder. Nearly a ­century ­later, astronomers have created optical interferometers at the Palomar Observatory in California and the Mauna Kea Observatory in Hawaii.

How Many Friends Does One Person Need? Dunbar’s Number and Other Evolutionary Quirks by Robin Dunbar, Robin Ian MacDonald Dunbar

agricultural Revolution, Albert Michelson, Donner party, Fellow of the Royal Society, glass ceiling, Gregor Mendel, Isaac Newton, mass immigration, Nash equilibrium, nuclear winter, out of africa, pattern recognition, Richard Feynman, social intelligence, Steven Pinker, theory of mind, Thomas Bayes, Thomas Malthus, trolley problem, University of East Anglia, upwardly mobile

In 1987, the prestigious Cleveland Orchestra under its then principal conductor Christoph von Dohnányi gave the world premiere of the latest work by the American minimalist composer Philip Glass. It was a piece entitled The Light and had been commissioned to celebrate the achievement of two local boys, Albert Michelson and Edward Morley, exactly one hundred years before. Now known to every physics student as the Michelson–Morley experiments, their work had finally put paid to the then received wisdom that space is filled with an ether through which celestial bodies and such phenomena as light travel, so paving the way for Einstein’s theory of relativity just two decades later.

Erwin Schrodinger and the Quantum Revolution by John Gribbin

Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, All science is either physics or stamp collecting, Arthur Eddington, British Empire, Brownian motion, double helix, Drosophila, Eddington experiment, Edmond Halley, Ernest Rutherford, Fellow of the Royal Society, Gregor Mendel, Henri Poincaré, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, Large Hadron Collider, lateral thinking, quantum cryptography, quantum entanglement, Richard Feynman, Schrödinger's Cat, The Present Situation in Quantum Mechanics, the scientific method, trade route, upwardly mobile

Einstein’s special theory of relativity is based upon the postulate that the measured speed of light is the same for all observers, no matter where they are or how they are moving, and this is borne out by a variety of experiments. The key practical evidence, as of the 1920s, came from a series of experiments carried out by Albert Michelson (1852–1931) and Edward Morley (1838–1923), dating back to the 1880s. In 1921, a similar experiment was carried out at the top of Mount Wilson, the site of an astronomical observatory in California, and seemed to show a slightly different result from measurements made at sea level. It was this claim that prompted Einstein to express his disbelief by making his famous comment “The Good Lord is subtle, but he is not malicious.”

The Golden Ratio: The Story of Phi, the World's Most Astonishing Number by Mario Livio

Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, Alfred Russel Wallace, Benoit Mandelbrot, Brownian motion, Buckminster Fuller, classic study, cosmological constant, Elliott wave, Eratosthenes, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Isaac Newton, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Johannes Kepler, mandelbrot fractal, music of the spheres, Nash equilibrium, power law, Ralph Nelson Elliott, Ralph Waldo Emerson, random walk, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, Thales of Miletus, the scientific method

Young, a child prodigy who spoke eleven languages by age sixteen, performed an experiment in which he passed light through two slits and demonstrated that the light on the viewing surface was “divided by dark stripes.” Young's results, which were followed by impressive theoretical work by French engineer Augustin Fresnel in 1815 to 1820, initiated a conversion of physicists to the wave theory. Later experiments conducted by the French physicist Léon Foucault in 1850 and by American physicist Albert Michelson in 1883 showed unambiguously that the refraction of light as it passes from air to water also behaves precisely as predicted by the wave theory. More important, the Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell (1831–1879) published in 1864 a comprehensive theory of electromagnetism that predicted the existence of propagating electromagnetic waves moving at the speed of light.

Lost in Math: How Beauty Leads Physics Astray by Sabine Hossenfelder

Adam Curtis, Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, anthropic principle, Arthur Eddington, Brownian motion, clockwork universe, cognitive bias, cosmic microwave background, cosmological constant, cosmological principle, crowdsourcing, dark matter, data science, deep learning, double helix, game design, Henri Poincaré, Higgs boson, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, Large Hadron Collider, Murray Gell-Mann, Nick Bostrom, random walk, Richard Feynman, Schrödinger's Cat, Skype, Stephen Hawking, sunk-cost fallacy, systematic bias, TED Talk, the scientific method

The followers of vortex theory were convinced by the theory’s beauty despite the utter lack of evidence. In 1883, in a brief review for the magazine Nature, Oliver Lodge referred to vortex theory as “beautiful” and “a theory about which one may almost dare to say that it deserves to be true.”33 Albert Michelson (who would go on to win a Nobel Prize) wrote in 1903 that vortex theory “ought to be true even if it is not.”34 Another fan was James Clerk Maxwell, who opined: But the greatest recommendation of [vortex] theory, from a philosophical point of view, is that its success in explaining phenomena does not depend on the ingenuity with which its contrivers “save appearances,” by introducing first one hypothetical force and then another.

How to Create a Mind: The Secret of Human Thought Revealed by Ray Kurzweil

Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, anesthesia awareness, anthropic principle, brain emulation, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, cloud computing, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, Dean Kamen, discovery of DNA, double helix, driverless car, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, George Gilder, Google Earth, Hans Moravec, Isaac Newton, iterative process, Jacquard loom, Jeff Hawkins, John von Neumann, Law of Accelerating Returns, linear programming, Loebner Prize, mandelbrot fractal, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, optical character recognition, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, Ralph Waldo Emerson, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, reversible computing, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), self-driving car, speech recognition, Steven Pinker, strong AI, the scientific method, theory of mind, Turing complete, Turing machine, Turing test, Wall-E, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, X Prize

The conclusion at that time was that light waves must be traveling through some sort of medium; after all, ocean waves traveled through water and sound waves traveled through air and other materials. Scientists called the medium through which light waves travel the “ether.” The boy was also aware of the 1887 experiment by American scientists Albert Michelson (1852–1931) and Edward Morley (1838–1923) that attempted to confirm the existence of the ether. That experiment was based on the analogy of traveling in a rowboat up- and downstream in a river. If you are paddling at a fixed speed, then your speed as measured from the shore will be faster if you are paddling with the stream as opposed to going against it.

Einstein's Dice and Schrödinger's Cat: How Two Great Minds Battled Quantum Randomness to Create a Unified Theory of Physics by Paul Halpern

Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, Arthur Eddington, Brownian motion, clockwork universe, cosmological constant, dark matter, double helix, Eddington experiment, Ernest Rutherford, Fellow of the Royal Society, Higgs boson, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, Large Hadron Collider, lone genius, luminiferous ether, Murray Gell-Mann, New Journalism, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, quantum entanglement, Richard Feynman, Schrödinger's Cat, seminal paper, The Present Situation in Quantum Mechanics, time dilation

The idea that the speed of light in a vacuum was constant—or even that light could travel through pure emptiness—was not widely accepted at the time Einstein was pondering this question. Many physicists of the day believed that light moved through an invisible substance called the “luminiferous aether,” or just “aether” for short. Earth’s motion relative to the aether should thereby be detectable. However, a well-known experiment in 1887 by American physicists Albert Michelson and Edward Morley had failed to detect such an effect. To try to reconcile light’s behavior with Newton’s laws of mechanics, Irish physicist Edward FitzGerald and, independently, Dutch physicist Henrik Lorentz suggested that fast-moving objects compress along their directions of motion. Such a shortening, called the Lorentz-FitzGerald 27 Einstein’s Dice and Schrödinger’s Cat contraction, would squash the instruments of the Michelson-Morley experiment in such a way to make it appear that the speed of light was always constant.

The Knowledge Machine: How Irrationality Created Modern Science by Michael Strevens

Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, anthropic principle, Arthur Eddington, Atul Gawande, coronavirus, COVID-19, dark matter, data science, Eddington experiment, Edmond Halley, Fellow of the Royal Society, fudge factor, germ theory of disease, Great Leap Forward, Gregor Mendel, heat death of the universe, Higgs boson, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of movable type, invention of the telescope, Isaac Newton, Islamic Golden Age, Johannes Kepler, Large Hadron Collider, longitudinal study, Louis Pasteur, military-industrial complex, Murray Gell-Mann, Peace of Westphalia, Richard Feynman, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, systematic bias, Thales of Miletus, the scientific method, Thomas Bayes, William of Occam

TWO PRINCIPAL PARTS of my explanation of science’s power, of my contribution to the Great Method Debate, are now in place: the iron rule’s procedural consensus and the Baconian convergence that the consensus makes possible. There is one further element to the story. In a basement in Ohio in 1887, Albert Michelson and Edward Morley sent two beams of light flying. One beam was traveling in the same direction as the earth’s motion around the sun; the other was traveling at right angles to the first. After traversing identical distances, the beams were reflected back to their source and compared. If their waveforms, when superimposed, failed to overlap exactly, it was because one was taking longer to make its journey than the other—which is precisely what Michelson and Morley expected.

Life Is Simple by Johnjoe McFadden

Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, Alfred Russel Wallace, animal electricity, anthropic principle, Astronomia nova, Bayesian statistics, Brownian motion, Commentariolus, complexity theory, cosmic microwave background, cosmological constant, cosmological principle, COVID-19, dark matter, double helix, Edmond Halley, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, Ernest Rutherford, Fellow of the Royal Society, gentleman farmer, Gregor Mendel, Henri Poincaré, Higgs boson, horn antenna, invention of the printing press, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Johannes Kepler, lockdown, music of the spheres, On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, Plato's cave, retrograde motion, Richard Feynman, the scientific method, Thomas Bayes, Thomas Malthus, William of Occam

If it is some kind of invisible substrate for light waves that fills all of space then it should be possible to measure the speed of an object relative to the aether, just as you can measure the speed of a boat relative to the water in the sea. The task is of course much more challenging, as light waves move at around 300 million metres per second, massively faster than any object on earth. However, in 1887, the American scientists Albert Michelson and Edward Morley came up with the clever idea of measuring light speed relative to the fastest object on earth which, relative to the sun, is the earth itself. The earth spins on its axis at around 447 metres per second as well as orbiting the sun at around 30,000 metres per second. The team realised that, rather like the Doppler effect, the speed of light should be different if measured in the direction of the earth’s motion, i.e. through the aether, or perpendicular to that direction.

Complexity: A Guided Tour by Melanie Mitchell

Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, Alfred Russel Wallace, algorithmic management, anti-communist, Arthur Eddington, Benoit Mandelbrot, bioinformatics, cellular automata, Claude Shannon: information theory, clockwork universe, complexity theory, computer age, conceptual framework, Conway's Game of Life, dark matter, discrete time, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, Eddington experiment, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, From Mathematics to the Technologies of Life and Death, Garrett Hardin, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, Gregor Mendel, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hacker News, Hans Moravec, Henri Poincaré, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, John Conway, John von Neumann, Long Term Capital Management, mandelbrot fractal, market bubble, Menlo Park, Murray Gell-Mann, Network effects, Norbert Wiener, Norman Macrae, Paul Erdős, peer-to-peer, phenotype, Pierre-Simon Laplace, power law, Ray Kurzweil, reversible computing, scientific worldview, stem cell, Stuart Kauffman, synthetic biology, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Tragedy of the Commons, Turing machine

René Descartes, one of reductionism’s earliest proponents, described his own scientific method thus: “to divide all the difficulties under examination into as many parts as possible, and as many as were required to solve them in the best way” and “to conduct my thoughts in a given order, beginning with the simplest and most easily understood objects, and gradually ascending, as it were step by step, to the knowledge of the most complex.”1 Since the time of Descartes, Newton, and other founders of the modern scientific method until the beginning of the twentieth century, a chief goal of science has been a reductionist explanation of all phenomena in terms of fundamental physics. Many late nineteenth-century scientists agreed with the well-known words of physicist Albert Michelson, who proclaimed in 1894 that “it seems probable that most of the grand underlying principles have been firmly established and that further advances are to be sought chiefly in the rigorous application of these principles to all phenomena which come under our notice.” Of course within the next thirty years, physics would be revolutionized by the discoveries of relativity and quantum mechanics.

Day We Found the Universe by Marcia Bartusiak

Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, Arthur Eddington, California gold rush, Cepheid variable, Copley Medal, cosmic microwave background, cosmological constant, Eddington experiment, Edmond Halley, Edward Charles Pickering, Fellow of the Royal Society, fudge factor, Harlow Shapley and Heber Curtis, Harvard Computers: women astronomers, horn antenna, invention of the telescope, Isaac Newton, Louis Pasteur, Magellanic Cloud, Occam's razor, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, Pluto: dwarf planet, William of Occam

Hubble compromised by taking science classes—mathematics, astronomy, physics, chemistry, geology—as well as the prerequisite courses in the classics, including heavy doses of Greek and Latin, that would prepare him for a legal career. In regard to learning science, the timing for Hubble was perfect. Though a relatively new institution, the University of Chicago had already attracted two top physicists, Albert Michelson and Robert Millikan, who would go on to receive Nobel Prizes for their seminal work. And the Yerkes Observatory, affiliated with the university, offered one of the best telescopes then in existence. The early 1900s was a time, Hubble later recalled, when the world was astir: “Motor cars, at last, were successfully competing with horses.

What We Cannot Know: Explorations at the Edge of Knowledge by Marcus Du Sautoy

Albert Michelson, Andrew Wiles, Antoine Gombaud: Chevalier de Méré, Arthur Eddington, banking crisis, bet made by Stephen Hawking and Kip Thorne, Black Swan, Brownian motion, clockwork universe, cosmic microwave background, cosmological constant, dark matter, Dmitri Mendeleev, Eddington experiment, Edmond Halley, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, Ernest Rutherford, Georg Cantor, Hans Lippershey, Harvard Computers: women astronomers, heat death of the universe, Henri Poincaré, Higgs boson, invention of the telescope, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, Large Hadron Collider, Magellanic Cloud, mandelbrot fractal, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Murray Gell-Mann, music of the spheres, Necker cube, Paul Erdős, Pierre-Simon Laplace, quantum entanglement, Richard Feynman, seminal paper, Skype, Slavoj Žižek, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, technological singularity, Thales of Miletus, Turing test, wikimedia commons

He believed that you could place clocks across the universe, and once they had all been synched they would continue to show the same time at whatever point you were in the universe. Others were not so convinced. Newton’s arch-rival Gottfried Leibniz believed that time existed only as a relative concept. A discovery made in 1887 by American scientists Albert Michelson and Edward Morley ultimately led to Leibniz’s view winning out over Newton’s. The American scientists found that if we measure the speed of light in a vacuum, then, regardless of whether we are moving towards or away from the source of the light, the measurement remains the same. This revelation was the seed for Einstein’s discovery that time was not quite as absolute as Newton had envisioned.

Radical Uncertainty: Decision-Making for an Unknowable Future by Mervyn King, John Kay

Airbus A320, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, algorithmic trading, anti-fragile, Antoine Gombaud: Chevalier de Méré, Arthur Eddington, autonomous vehicles, availability heuristic, banking crisis, Barry Marshall: ulcers, battle of ideas, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, bitcoin, Black Swan, Boeing 737 MAX, Bonfire of the Vanities, Brexit referendum, Brownian motion, business cycle, business process, capital asset pricing model, central bank independence, collapse of Lehman Brothers, correlation does not imply causation, credit crunch, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, DeepMind, demographic transition, discounted cash flows, disruptive innovation, diversification, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, Dutch auction, easy for humans, difficult for computers, eat what you kill, Eddington experiment, Edmond Halley, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, Edward Thorp, Elon Musk, Ethereum, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, experimental economics, experimental subject, fear of failure, feminist movement, financial deregulation, George Akerlof, germ theory of disease, Goodhart's law, Hans Rosling, Helicobacter pylori, high-speed rail, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, income per capita, incomplete markets, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, invention of the wheel, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Jim Simons, Johannes Kepler, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Snow's cholera map, John von Neumann, Kenneth Arrow, Kōnosuke Matsushita, Linda problem, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, Louis Pasteur, mandelbrot fractal, market bubble, market fundamentalism, military-industrial complex, Money creation, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, Monty Hall problem, Nash equilibrium, Nate Silver, new economy, Nick Leeson, Northern Rock, nudge theory, oil shock, PalmPilot, Paul Samuelson, peak oil, Peter Thiel, Philip Mirowski, Phillips curve, Pierre-Simon Laplace, popular electronics, power law, price mechanism, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, railway mania, RAND corporation, reality distortion field, rent-seeking, Richard Feynman, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, sealed-bid auction, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Socratic dialogue, South Sea Bubble, spectrum auction, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Suez crisis 1956, Tacoma Narrows Bridge, Thales and the olive presses, Thales of Miletus, The Chicago School, the map is not the territory, The Market for Lemons, The Nature of the Firm, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Bayes, Thomas Davenport, Thomas Malthus, Toyota Production System, transaction costs, ultimatum game, urban planning, value at risk, world market for maybe five computers, World Values Survey, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

If so, he might have learnt that young economists were receiving a similar warning from that towering figure of mid-nineteenth-century thought John Stuart Mill, who told them: ‘Happily, there is nothing in the laws of Value which remains for the present or any future writer to clear up; the theory of the subject is complete.’ 10 A quarter century after Jolly, his verdict on his subject was reiterated by the irrepressible Lord Kelvin, who assured the British Academy for the Advancement of Science that, at least as far as physics was concerned, little advancement was possible or necessary; Albert Michelson, the first American scientist to be awarded a Nobel Prize, pronounced, ‘It seems probable that most of the grand underlying principles have been firmly established . . . An eminent physicist remarked that the future truths of physical science are to be looked for in the sixth place of decimals.’ 11 Perhaps the older Planck had Jolly’s advice in his mind when he suggested that science progressed only through the funerals of the previous generation.

Lifespan: Why We Age—and Why We Don't Have To by David A. Sinclair, Matthew D. Laplante

Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, Anthropocene, anti-communist, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Atul Gawande, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, biofilm, Biosphere 2, blockchain, British Empire, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, carbon footprint, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, clean water, creative destruction, CRISPR, dark matter, dematerialisation, discovery of DNA, double helix, Drosophila, Easter island, Edward Jenner, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, experimental subject, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Fellow of the Royal Society, global pandemic, Grace Hopper, helicopter parent, income inequality, invention of the telephone, Isaac Newton, John Snow's cholera map, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, labor-force participation, life extension, Louis Pasteur, McMansion, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, microbiome, mouse model, mutually assured destruction, Paul Samuelson, personalized medicine, phenotype, Philippa Foot, placebo effect, plutocrats, power law, quantum entanglement, randomized controlled trial, Richard Feynman, ride hailing / ride sharing, self-driving car, seminal paper, Skype, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, TED Talk, the scientific method, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, Tim Cook: Apple, Tragedy of the Commons, trolley problem, union organizing, universal basic income, WeWork, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

—it is far more common for people not to see something coming. All of us are guilty of it. We extrapolate linearly. More people, more horses, more horse manure. More cars, more air pollution, always more climate change. But that’s not how it works. When technologies go exponential, even experts can be blindsided. The American physicist Albert Michelson, who won a Nobel Prize for measuring the speed of light, gave a speech at the University of Chicago in 1894, declaring that there was probably little else to discover in physics besides additional decimal places.1 He died in 1931, as quantum mechanics was in full swing. And in his 1995 book, The Road Ahead, Bill Gates made no mention of the internet, though he substantially revised it about a year later, humbly admitting that he had “vastly underestimated how important and how quickly” the internet would come to prominence.2 Kevin Kelly, the founding editor of Wired magazine, who has a better track record than most at predicting the future, has a golden rule: “Embrace things rather than try and fight them.

The Man Who Knew Infinity: A Life of the Genius Ramanujan by Robert Kanigel

Albert Michelson, Arthur Eddington, Augustin-Louis Cauchy, British Empire, computer age, Copley Medal, creative destruction, Fellow of the Royal Society, Filipino sailors, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Gregor Mendel, Isaac Newton, Mahatma Gandhi, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, Paul Erdős, the market place, upwardly mobile

Then, two weeks later, on December 18, Hardy and eleven other mathematicians—Hobson and Baker were among them, as were Bromwich, Littlewood, Forsyth, and Alfred North Whitehead, Bertrand Russell’s collaborator on Principia Mathematica—together put him up for an honor more esteemed by far than any fellowship of a Cambridge college: they signed the Certificate of a Candidate for Election that nominated him to become a Fellow of the Royal Society. The Royal Society was Britain’s preeminent scientific body, going back to 1660 when Christopher Wren and Robert Boyles helped found it. There were, at about the time Hardy put up Ramanujan, 39 foreign members, including the Russian Ivan Pavlov, the American Albert Michelson (of Michelson-Morley experiment fame), and 6 other Nobel Prize winners. The Royal Society counted in all 464 members in physics, chemistry, biology, mathematics, and every branch of science. Being an F.R.S. meant that forevermore those three little letters would be appended to your name, appear on your own scientific papers, and on letters addressed to you.

How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain by Lisa Feldman Barrett

airport security, Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, autism spectrum disorder, Drosophila, emotional labour, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, framing effect, Google Glasses, Higgs boson, Isaac Newton, language acquisition, longitudinal study, luminiferous ether, meta-analysis, nocebo, phenotype, placebo effect, randomized controlled trial, Shai Danziger, Skype, Steven Pinker, sugar pill, systems thinking, TED Talk, the scientific method, theory of mind, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions

There is no known validity to these particular facial poses, and studies that use more objective methods like facial EMG and facial coding do not find evidence that people routinely make these movements in real life during episodes of emotion. Yet scientists continue to use the basic emotion method regardless. After all, it produces very consistent results.24 Each time a scientific “fact” is overturned it leads to new avenues for discovery. The physicist Albert 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 universal emotions.

The Power Makers by Maury Klein

Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, animal electricity, Augustin-Louis Cauchy, book value, British Empire, business climate, Cornelius Vanderbilt, cotton gin, Ford Model T, General Motors Futurama, industrial research laboratory, invention of radio, invention of the telegraph, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Louis Pasteur, luminiferous ether, margin call, Menlo Park, price stability, railway mania, Right to Buy, the scientific method, trade route, transcontinental railway, working poor

As such it was considered to be motionless, a constant through which all other bodies, including the earth as it orbited the sun, traveled. Light also traveled through the ether, which explained why distant stars were visible.70 However, this notion of the ether received an unexpected and fatal blow from, of all things, a failed experiment by physicist Albert Michelson. He first became absorbed in the task of measuring accurately the speed of light. Little progress had been made since the work of Danish astronomer Olaus Roemer in 1676, but Michelson managed in 1879 to come up with the figure of 186,320 miles a second, remarkably close to the 186,282 miles later accepted.