This chapter re-examines the view widely held by physicists that the luminiferous ether became an outdated concept in the early twentieth century and that Albert Einstein’s special relativity killed it. A second common narrative is that the null result of the 1887 Michelson–Morley ether-drift experiment led to Einstein’s theory and the demise of the ether. On the basis of these two simplified narratives, it has become part of the physicists’ ‘imagined past’ that the Michelson–Morley experiment provided the key evidence decreeing the end of the ether. Using scientometrics, this chapter argues that the first part of this idealised narrative is misleading and that the two parts of this narrative are deeply intertwined, as both had historical roots in the reception of Einstein’s relativity theories. In this perspective, the well-known episode of Dayton C. Miller’s repetition of the Michelson–Morley experiment in the 1920s appears in a new light.
Michelson– Morley experiment: A misconceived & misinterpreted experiment
