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Complete aether dragging can explain the negative outcome of all aether drift experiments (like the Michelson–Morley experiment). However, this theory is considered to be wrong for the following reasons: [1] [11] The Fizeau experiment (1851) indicated only a partial entrainment of light.
The hypothesis of aether drift implies that because one of the arms would inevitably turn into the direction of the wind at the same time that another arm was turning perpendicularly to the wind, an effect should be noticeable even over a period of minutes.
The Lorentz ether theory, which was developed mainly between 1892 and 1906 by Lorentz and Poincaré, was based on the aether theory of Augustin-Jean Fresnel, Maxwell's equations and the electron theory of Rudolf Clausius. [B 1] Lorentz's 1895 paper rejected the aether drift theories, and refused to express assumptions about the nature of the ...
In the 17th century, Robert Boyle was a proponent of an aether hypothesis. According to Boyle, the aether consists of subtle particles, one sort of which explains the absence of vacuum and the mechanical interactions between bodies, and the other sort of which explains phenomena such as magnetism (and possibly gravity) that are, otherwise, inexplicable on the basis of purely mechanical ...
Hendrik Lorentz and George Francis FitzGerald offered, within the framework of Lorentz ether theory, an explanation of how the Michelson–Morley experiment could have failed to detect motion through the aether. However, the initial Lorentz theory predicted that motion through the aether would create a birefringence effect, which Rayleigh and ...
1920 – Einstein says that special relativity does not require rejecting the aether, and that the gravitational field of general relativity may be called aether, to which no state of motion can be attributed. 1921 – Dayton Miller conducts aether drift experiments at Mount Wilson. Miller performs tests with insulated and non-magnetic ...
Although Fresnel's hypothesis was empirically successful in explaining Fizeau's results, many experts in the field, including Fizeau himself, found Fresnel's hypothesis partial aether-dragging unsatisfactory. Fresnel had found an empirical formula that worked but no mechanical model of the aether was used to derive it. [S 4]
The idea that the aether might be completely dragged within or in the vicinity of Earth, by which the negative aether drift experiments could be explained, was refuted by a variety of experiments. Oliver Lodge (1893) found that rapidly whirling steel disks above and below a sensitive common path interferometric arrangement failed to produce a ...