On 13-May-06, at 8:22 AM, Ashish Gulhati wrote:
Ummm ... Michelson-Morley [1]?
Was quite unnecessary.
(Unnecessary to prove the non-existence of aether, is what I meant.
It was, however, a necessary experiment for the proponents of the
aether theory to conduct, in order to collect evidence in favor of the
theory, just as proponents of ID should be trying to gather hard
evidence
for their theories if they want to be at all logical and scientific
about it).
And as is clear from the Wikipedia article, MM was indeed _not_ an
experiment aimed at proving the non-existence of the aether at all.
Rather, it was "an experiment to detect the presence and properties of
this aether".
The WP article also describes it as a "failed" experiment since it
failed
to find any detectable trace of an aether wind. In fact "Morley was not
convinced of his own results".
So the experimenters clearly did not set out to prove the non-existence
of the aether, but rather to find evidence pointing to the existence and
properties of the aether, as behooves anyone proposing or supporting
a theory postulating the existence of a new entity.
Their failure to find any evidence of the aether's existence was a
good reason to dismiss the aether theory, but the whole reason they
needed to conduct the experiment in the first place was to find evidence
in support of the aether theory, not to disprove a theory for which
there
was no evidence (which is always entirely unnecessary).
Also note that given the theoretical framework of physics at the time,
the aether postulate did make intuitive sense and fulfill a theoretical
need. Given that sound and water waves required a medium to move
through, it made intuitive sense to imagine that EM waves did too.
This is more than can be said for the ID hypotheses.
#!
