Michael Nielsen: belief

Transcript context

…Abraham Pais. Subtle is the Lord. Also from Imre Lakatos, The Methodology of Scientific Research Programmes. The way it’s told is that Michelson-Morley proved that the ether did not exist. Therefore, it created a crisis in physics that Einstein solved with special relativity. What you’re pointing out is he actually was trying to distinguish between many different theories of ether. If you’re in space or if you’re on Earth, it’s the same direction of ether, or maybe the ether wind is being carried around by the Earth, and so you can’t really experience it on Earth. But if you go to a high enough altitude, you might be able to experience it. In fact, Michelson’s experiments, the famous one is 1887, but he conducted these experiments for basically two decades. For longer than that. He conducted the first one in 1881, I think, but he continued to believe until he died. He died, I think it was 1929 or so. It was the late twenties. He was still doing experiments in the 1920s about whether or not the ether existed. So he continued to believe in the ether to the end of his life. I think the last public statement he made was a year or two before he died, and he basically still believed it at that point. In fact, there was another physicist, Miller, who kept doing these experiments in the 1920s. He thought that if he went to a high enough altitude, Mount Wilson in California… “Oh, I’m high enough that the ether winds are not being dragged by the Earth. And I’ve measured the effect of the ether.” Einstein hears about this and he says, and this is where you get the famous quote, “Subtle is the Lord, but malicious He is not.” Anyways, I think the reason the story is interesting is for many different reasons. One of the ways in which the real history of science is different from this idea you get of the scientific method is that you really can’t apply falsification as easily as you might think. It’s not clear what is being falsified. Is it just another version of the theory of the ether that’s being falsified? Certainly you can’t induce the theory of special relativity from the fact that one version of the ether seems to be disconfirmed by these experiments.…

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