Did Michelson believe in the aether?
My experimental work was directly motivated by the prevailing scientific understanding of the time, which largely included the concept of the luminiferous aether as the medium for light propagation. The Michelson-Morley experiment was conceived as a rigorous test of this hypothesis. While the experiment's null result indicated that our understanding of the aether might be flawed or that the aether itself did not exist as conceived, my focus remained on the precise experimental verification of physical phenomena.
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