For most people here on Earth, the first day of November, 1887, was like any other day — the sun rose in the east and eventually set in the west as the Earth rotated on its axis while following its usual orbit around the sun — just as their school teachers and revered scientists had told them it would.
But for two American physicists — Albert Michelson and Edward Morley at Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio — the Earth’s motion appeared to come to a screeching halt — creating the greatest crisis in the history of physics and science that the world had ever known.
Indeed, on November 1, 1887, Michelson-Morley published the results of their famous experiment, “On The Relative Motion of the Earth and the Luminous Ether” in the American Science Journal — the implications of which brought into question the very foundations of the Copernican Model of the “Universe.”
The idea behind the Michelson-Morley experiment was simple and elegant — if the Earth is, in fact, orbiting the Sun, it should then be possible to detect and measure that motion as it travels through the illuminated “aether”.
Physicists had logically assumed there must be some sort of invisible medium — through which light can travel in detectable waves — in the same way motion travels through water — and sound travels through air — in waves. They called this invisible background medium the “aether”.
Up to this point, physicists and astronomers merely presumed that the Earth rotated on its axis and orbited the Sun — they had never conducted any actual experiments to prove that this was actually the case.
As we showed in our previous article on this issue, Kepler had merely worked out mathematical models to demonstrate how the Copernican Model could be true — and then Newton proposed the physical laws that the Model would have to conform to in order to be true — however, neither men went beyond the theoretical into the actual realm of demonstrable and repeatable experiments......
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