Special Relativity Lecture

Prateek Puri August 24, 2010

The Michelson-Morley Experiment

Physicists in the late nineteenth century were struggling to nd a way to detect ether, and with good reason. After all, how exactly does one detect something that is supposedly undetectable? Thankfully, two savvy physicists, Albert Michelson and Edward Morley, were up to the challenge. However, to understand the principles behind the Michelson-Morley experiment, rst let us observe that the earth is constantly moving through space as it revolves around the sun. Since we know that ether is the material that occupies all of space, we can also say that the earth itself is constantly traveling through ether, and therefore has a relative velocity with respect to the ether, also known as an ether wind. Since light travels through ether, its speed would also be dependent on this ether wind, for according to Newtonian Mechanics, relative velocities are additive. After all, a boat travels at dierent speeds when traveling with and against a current, and in this particular situation, light is the boat and the ether wind is the current. Michelson and Morley used this information to their advantage, and they constructed a device known as Interferometer that would be able to detect the dierences in light speed of light beams that were traveling at dierent relative velocities with respect to the ether. A picture of the testing apparatus is included on the next page.

Figure 1: (a) Interferometer After being emitted from a source, light beams would travel to a beamsplitter and then be sent along two dierent paths. One path would be parallel to the ether wind, and the other would be perpendicular to it. Then, each light beam 1

would be reected back to the beamsplittler by another mirror and eventually end up at the bottom of the apparatus. The total distance that each light beam traveled would be the same; however, since each light beam is traveling at a dierent relative velocity with respect to the ether, we would expect their pathway times to be dierent. Newtonian Mechanics supported such a prediction, and such results were expected from the experiment. However, when the experiment was conducted, something very shocking happened. Each light beam actually had the same pathway time! This result was extremely bizarre and was completely incongruent with Newtonian Mechanics. Why should two light beams traveling at dierent relative velocities transverse the same distance in the same amount of time? These results suggested that light was not subject to the basic laws of Newtonian Mechanics and traveled at the same speed regardless of source velocity. Consider our baseball example discussed earlier except this time imagine our boy holding a ashlight instead of a baseball. Let our boy turn on his ashlight while he is standing still and again while he is traveling at some velocity on his bike. The results of the Michelson-Morley experiment suggested that light beams from the ashlight would travel at the same velocity in both situations, a completely nonintuitive result. The Michelson-Morley experiment sent the physics community into a state of frenzy as physicists scrambled to explain the experiments perplexing results.

Enter Einstein

The results of the Michelson-Morley experiment were so disturbing because they directly challenged Newtonian Mechanics, a set of concepts that had presided over physics for hundreds of years. Not wanting to admit s aw in Newtonian Mechanics, most physicists desperately searched for other ways to rationalize the experiments ndings while still clinging to basic classical principles, but one young radical Jewish scientist took a far more bold approach. Instead of resisting the experiments results, Albert Einstein fully embraced the ndings of Michelson and Morley and proposed a solution by rst setting two basic axioms. 1. The laws of physics are identical in all inertial reference frames 2. The speed of light is always constant, regardless of any motion of source or observer The rst axiom is known as the principle of relativity, and it expresses the lack a distinction between dierent reference frames in nature. The second axiom was much more radical, and it provided an explanation for the MichelsonMorley results while also suggesting that Newtonian Mechanics was awed and in need of revision. Instead of being baed by the constant speed of light,

Einstein took this as a universal truth and developed a novel perspective of the universe, and special relativity was born. I must emphasize the uniqueness of Einsteins theory, for it was a truly innovative idea that redened the future of physics. In a few simple papers, Einstein had overthrown Newtonian Mechanics and ushered in the era of modern physics. Now we will examine the consequences of special relativity and study its eect on space and time. On a side note, with the emergence of special relativity, ether theory slowly began to fade into obscurity. Special relativity suggested that there was no universal reference frame, and the concept of an ether eventually became outdated with physicists. However in recent years, a revised version of ether theory has started to make a resurgence. Some feel this new ether theory is preferable to special relativity because it provides a model of the universe where one can derive why the speed of light is constant rather than blindly accepting this as an axiom. If you are interested in reading more about the new version of ether theory, please visit the following link: Ether Theory