People sometimes claim that the luminiferous aether destroyed the principle of relativity in Newtonian physics, but there was never any justification for identifying the luminiferous aether with absolute space.
42.
In special relativity, the space and time coordinates depend on the inertial observer's frame of reference, and the luminiferous aether plays no role in the physics.
43.
And the unexpected, negative results of the Michelson-Morley experiment in their search of the luminiferous aether ultimately led to the Theory of Special Relativity by Albert Einstein.
44.
However, this explanation proved inaccurate once the wave nature of light was better understood, and correcting it became a major goal of the 19th century theories of luminiferous aether.
45.
This left some confusion among physicists, many of whom thought that a luminiferous aether was incompatible with the relativity principle, in the way it was defined by Henri Poincar?
46.
Neither he nor Michelson ever considered that these null results disproved the hypothesis of the existence of " luminiferous aether ", in which electromagnetic waves were thought to be propagated.
47.
In 1776, Laplace published a memoir in which he first explored the possible influences of a purported luminiferous ether or of a law of gravitation that did not act instantaneously.
48.
In the 19th century, luminiferous aether ( or ether ), meaning light-bearing aether, was a theorized medium for the propagation of light ( electromagnetic radiation ).
49.
The existence of the hypothetical substance " luminiferous aether " proposed by Huygens in 1678 was cast into strong doubt in the late nineteenth century by the Michelson Morley experiment.
50.
Traditionally, light was reconciled with classical mechanics by assuming the existence of a stationary medium through which light propagated, the luminiferous aether, which was later shown not to exist.
