Albert A. Michelson

Not to be confused with the athlete Albert Michelsen.

Albert A. Michelson
Born	(1852-12-19)December 19, 1852 Strzelno, Kingdom of Prussia (modern Poland)
Died	May 9, 1931(1931-05-09) (aged 78) Pasadena, California
Nationality	United States
Alma mater	United States Naval Academy University of Berlin
Known for	Speed of light Michelson–Morley experiment
Spouse(s)	Margaret Hemingway (1877–1898; divorced; 3 children) Edna Stanton (1899–1931; his death; 3 children)
Awards	Matteucci Medal (1903) Nobel Prize in Physics (1907) Copley Medal (1907) Elliott Cresson Medal (1912) Henry Draper Medal (1916) Albert Medal (1920) Franklin Medal (1923) Duddell Medal and Prize (1929)
Scientific career
Fields	Physics
Institutions	Case Western Reserve University Clark University University of Chicago
Doctoral advisor	Hermann Helmholtz<ref>Physics Tree profile Albert Abraham Michelson</ref> Alfred Cornu
Doctoral students	Robert Millikan
Signature
File:Albert A Michelson Signature.svg

Albert Abraham Michelson (surname pronunciation anglicized as "Michael-son", December 19, 1852 – May 9, 1931) was an American physicist known for his work on the measurement of the speed of light and especially for the Michelson–Morley experiment. In 1907 he received the Nobel Prize in Physics. He became the first American to receive the Nobel Prize in sciences.

Biography

Michelson was born in Strzelno, Province of Posen in Prussia (now Poland) into a Jewish family.<ref>"Albert Abraham Michelson 1852–1931". American Institute of Physics. </ref> He moved to the US with his parents in 1855, at the age of two. He grew up in the mining towns of Murphy's Camp, California and Virginia City, Nevada, where his father was a merchant. His family was Jewish by birth but non-religious, and Michelson himself was a lifelong agnostic.<ref>Naukowe, Łódzkie (2003). Bulletin de la Société des sciences et des lettres de Łódź: Série, Recherches sur les déformations, Volumes 39–42. Société des sciences et des lettres de Łódź. p. 162. Michelson's biographers stress, that our hero was not conspicuous by religiousness. His father was a free-thinker and Michelson grew up in non-religious family and have no opportunity to acknowledge the belief of his forebears. He was agnostic through his whole life and only for the short period he was a member of the 21st lodge in Washington. </ref><ref>John D. Barrow (2002). The Book of Nothing: Vacuums, Voids, and the Latest Ideas About the Origins of the Universe. Random House Digital, Inc. p. 136. ISBN 978-0-375-72609-5. Morley was deeply religious. His original training had been in theology and he only turned to chemistry, a self-taught hobby, when he was unable to enter the ministry. Michelson, by contrast, was a religious agnostic. </ref><ref>1984; Dorothy Michelson Livingston; One Pass Productions; Cinema Guild. The Master of Light: A Biography of Albert A. Michelson. University of Chicago Press. p. 106. On the religious question, Michelson disagreed with both these men. He had renounced any belief that moral issues were at stake in ... </ref> He spent his high school years in San Francisco in the home of his aunt, Henriette Levy (née Michelson), who was the mother of author Harriet Lane Levy.<ref name="Levy-47">Levy, 920 O'Farrell Street, 47.</ref>

President Ulysses S. Grant awarded Michelson a special appointment to the U.S. Naval Academy in 1869.<ref>Nimitz Library's Virtual Exhibits – LibExhibits</ref> During his four years as a midshipman at the Academy, Michelson excelled in optics, heat, climatology and drawing. After graduating in 1873 and two years at sea, he returned to the Naval Academy in 1875 to become an instructor in physics and chemistry until 1879. In 1879, he was posted to the Nautical Almanac Office, Washington (part of the United States Naval Observatory<ref>"Nineteenth century astronomy at the U.S. Naval Academy". Bibcode:2002JAHH....5..165S. </ref><ref>"USNO - Our Command History". </ref><ref>http://eprints.jcu.edu.au/4957/1/4957_Shankland%26Orchiston_2002.pdf</ref>), to work with Simon Newcomb. In the following year he obtained leave of absence to continue his studies in Europe. He visited the Universities of Berlin and Heidelberg, and the Collège de France and École Polytechnique in Paris.

In 1877, he married Margaret Hemingway, daughter of a wealthy New York stockbroker and lawyer. They had two sons and a daughter.<ref>James, I. (2009). Driven to Innovate: A Century of Jewish Mathematicians and Physicists p. 101. . "In 1877, he married Margaret Hemingway, daughter of a wealthy New York stockbroker and lawyer. This marriage lasted twenty years and produced two sons and a daughter."</ref>

Michelson was fascinated with the sciences, and the problem of measuring the speed of light in particular. While at Annapolis, he conducted his first experiments of the speed of light, as part of a class demonstration in 1877. His Annapolis experiment was refined, and in 1879, he measured the speed of light in air to be 299,864 ± 51 kilometres per second, and estimated the speed of light in vacuum as 299,940 km/s, or 186,380 mi/s.<ref>"raman-scattering.eu". </ref><ref>"Optics at the U.S. Naval Academy". Optical Society of America. </ref><ref>"Michelson's 1879 determinations of the speed of light". Department of Statistics and Actuarial Science, University of Waterloo (Canada). </ref> After two years of studies in Europe, he resigned from the Navy in 1881. In 1883 he accepted a position as professor of physics at the Case School of Applied Science in Cleveland, Ohio and concentrated on developing an improved interferometer. In 1887 he and Edward Morley carried out the famous Michelson–Morley experiment which failed to detect evidence of the existence of the luminiferous ether. He later moved on to use astronomical interferometers in the measurement of stellar diameters and in measuring the separations of binary stars.

In 1889 Michelson became a professor at Clark University at Worcester, Massachusetts and in 1892 was appointed professor and the first head of the department of physics at the newly organized University of Chicago.

In 1899, he married Edna Stanton. They raised one son and three daughters.

In 1907, Michelson had the honor of being the first American to receive a Nobel Prize in Physics "for his optical precision instruments and the spectroscopic and metrological investigations carried out with their aid". He also won the Copley Medal in 1907, the Henry Draper Medal in 1916 and the Gold Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society in 1923. A crater on the Moon is named after him.

Michelson died in Pasadena, California at the age of 78. The University of Chicago Residence Halls remembered Michelson and his achievements by dedicating 'Michelson House' in his honor. Case Western Reserve has dedicated a Michelson House to him, and Michelson Hall (an academic building of science classrooms, laboratories and offices) at the United States Naval Academy also bears his name. Clark University named a theatre after him.<ref>"Visual and Performing Arts - Little Center". Clark University. </ref> Michelson Laboratory at Naval Air Weapons Station China Lake in Ridgecrest, California is named for him. There is a display in the publicly accessible area of the Lab which includes facsimiles of Michelson's Nobel Prize medal, the prize document, and examples of his diffraction gratings.

Speed of light

Page one of Michelson's Experimental Determination of the Velocity of Light

Concluding page of Michelson's Experimental Determination of the Velocity of Light

Early measurements

As early as 1869, while still serving as an officer in the United States Navy, Michelson started planning a repeat of the rotating-mirror method of Léon Foucault for measuring the speed of light, using improved optics and a longer baseline. He conducted some preliminary measurements using largely improvised equipment in 1878, about the same time that his work came to the attention of Simon Newcomb, director of the Nautical Almanac Office who was already advanced in planning his own study. Michelson published his result of 299,910 ± 50 km/s in 1879 before joining Newcomb in Washington DC to assist with his measurements there. Thus began a long professional collaboration and friendship between the two.

Simon Newcomb, with his more adequately funded project, obtained a value of 299,860 ± 30 km/s, just at the extreme edge of consistency with Michelson's. Michelson continued to "refine" his method and in 1883 published a measurement of 299,853 ± 60 km/s, rather closer to that of his mentor.

Lt. Cmdr. Albert A. Michelson while serving in the U.S. Navy. He rejoined the U.S. Navy in World War I,<ref name=Nobel>"Albert A. Michelson - Facts". </ref> when this portrait was taken.

Mount Wilson and Lookout Mountain

In 1906, a novel electrical method was used by E. B. Rosa and the National Bureau of Standards to obtain a value for the speed of light of 299,781 ± 10 km/s. Though this result has subsequently been shown to be severely biased by the poor electrical standards in use at the time, it seems to have set a fashion for rather lower measured values.

From 1920, Michelson started planning a definitive measurement from the Mount Wilson Observatory, using a baseline to Lookout Mountain, a prominent bump on the south ridge of Mount San Antonio ("Old Baldy"), some 22 miles distant.

In 1922, the U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey began two years of painstaking measurement of the baseline using the recently available invar tapes. With the baseline length established in 1924, measurements were carried out over the next two years to obtain the published value of 299,796 ± 4 km/s.<ref>

 Garner, C. L., Captain (retired) (April 1949). "A Geodetic Measurement of Unusually High Accuracy" (PDF). U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey Journal. Coast and Geodetic Survey: 68–74. Retrieved August 13, 2009. </ref>

Famous as the measurement is, it was beset by problems, not least of which was the haze created by the smoke from forest fires which blurred the mirror image. It is also probable that the intensively detailed work of the geodetic survey, with an estimated error of less than one part in 1 million, was compromised by a shift in the baseline arising from the Santa Barbara earthquake of June 29, 1925, which was an estimated magnitude of 6.3 on the Richter scale.

The now-famous Michelson–Morley experiment also influenced the affirmation attempts of peer Albert Einstein's theory of general relativity and special relativity, using similar optical instrumentation. These instruments and related collaborations included the participation of fellow physicists Dayton Miller, Hendrik Lorentz, and Robert Shankland.

Michelson, Pease, and Pearson

The period after 1927 marked the advent of new measurements of the speed of light using novel electro-optic devices, all substantially lower than Michelson's 1926 value.

Michelson sought another measurement, but this time in an evacuated tube to avoid difficulties in interpreting the image owing to atmospheric effects. In 1930, he began a collaboration with Francis G. Pease and Fred Pearson to perform a measurement in a 1.6 km tube 3 feet in diameter at the Irvine Ranch near Santa Ana, California. In multiple reflections the light path was increased to 10 miles. For the first time in history the speed of light was measured in an almost perfect vacuum of 0.5 mm of mercury. Michelson died with only 36 of the 233 measurement series completed and the experiment was subsequently beset by geological instability and condensation problems before the result of 299,774 ± 11 km/s, consistent with the prevailing electro-optic values, was published posthumously in 1935.

Interferometry

In 1887 he collaborated with colleague Edward Williams Morley of Western Reserve University, now part of Case Western Reserve University, in the Michelson–Morley experiment. Their experiment for the expected motion of the Earth relative to the aether, the hypothetical medium in which light was supposed to travel, resulted in a null result. Surprised, Michelson repeated the experiment with greater and greater precision over the next years, but continued to find no ability to measure the aether. The Michelson-Morley results were immensely influential in the physics community, leading Hendrik Lorentz to devise his now-famous Lorentz contraction equations as a means of explaining the null result.

There has been some historical controversy over whether Albert Einstein was aware of the Michelson–Morley results when he developed his theory of special relativity, which pronounced the aether to be "superfluous." In a later interview, Einstein said of the Michelson–Morley experiment, "I was not conscious it had influenced me directly... I guess I just took it for granted that it was true."<ref>Swenson, Loyd S. Jr., The Ethereal Aether: A History of the Michelson–Morley–Miller Aether-Drift Experiments, 1880–1930, University of Texas Press, 1972</ref> Regardless of Einstein's specific knowledge, the experiment is today considered the canonical experiment in regards to showing the lack of a detectable aether.<ref>Note that while Einstein's 1905 paper On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies appears to reference the experiment on first glance—"together with the unsuccessful attempts to discover any motion of the earth relatively to the 'light medium,' suggest that the phenomena of electrodynamics as well as of mechanics possess no properties corresponding to the idea of absolute rest"—it has been shown that Einstein was referring to a different category of experiments here.</ref><ref>Holton, Gerald, "Einstein, Michelson, and the 'Crucial' Experiment", Isis, Vol. 60, No. 2 (Summer, 1969), pp. 133–197</ref>

Astronomical interferometry

From 1920 and into 1921 Michelson and Francis G. Pease became the first individuals to measure the diameter of a star other than the Sun. They used an astronomical interferometer at the Mount Wilson Observatory to measure the diameter of the super-giant star Betelgeuse. A periscope arrangement was used to obtain a densified pupil in the interferometer, a method later investigated in detail by Antoine Émile Henry Labeyrie for use in "Hypertelescopes". The measurement of stellar diameters and the separations of binary stars took up an increasing amount of Michelson's life after this.

A century later, the specific interferometer instrumentation design produced by Albert Michelson has become the principal means to conduct astronomical interferometry. The "Michelson Interferometer" design is found on modern operational observatories such as VLTI, CHARA and the U.S. Navy's NPOI.

Michelson in popular culture

Commemorative plaque in Strzelno, Poland, were Michelson was born, founded by Polish Physical Society.

In an episode of the television series Bonanza ("Look to the Stars", broadcast March 18, 1962), Ben Cartwright (Lorne Greene) helps the 16-year-old Michelson (portrayed by 25-year-old Douglas Lambert (1936–1986)) obtain an appointment to the U.S. Naval Academy, despite the opposition of the bigoted town schoolteacher (played by William Schallert). Bonanza was set in and around Virginia City, Nevada, where Michelson lived with his parents prior to leaving for the Naval Academy. In a voice-over at the end of the episode, Greene mentions Michelson's 1907 Nobel Prize.

The home in which Michelson lived as a child in Murphys Camp, California is now a tasting room for Hovey Wine.

New Beast Theater Works in collaboration with High Concept Laboratories produced a 'semi-opera' about Michelson, his obsessive working style and its effect on his family life. The production ran from February 11 to February 26, 2011 in Chicago at The Building Stage. Michelson was portrayed by Jon Stutzman. The play was directed by David Maral with music composed by Joshua Dumas.

Norman Fitzroy Maclean wrote an essay "Billiards is a Good Game"; published in The Norman Maclean Reader (ed. O. Alan Weltzien, 2008), it is an appreciation of Michelson from Maclean's vantage point as a graduate student regularly watching him play billiards.

Honors and awards

A monument at United States Naval Academy marks the path of Michelson's experiments measuring the speed of light.

• 1888 – Rumford Prize
• 1903 – Matteucci Medal
• 1907 – Copley Medal
• 1907 – Nobel Prize in Physics<ref name=Nobel/>
• 1914 – Elliott Cresson Medal
• 1916 – Henry Draper Medal from the National Academy of Sciences <ref name=Draper>"Henry Draper Medal". National Academy of Sciences. Archived from the original on January 26, 2013. Retrieved February 19, 2011. </ref>
• 1922 – Prix Jules Janssen, the highest award of the Société astronomique de France, the French astronomical society.
• 1923 – Gold Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society
• 1923 – Franklin Medal

Michelson was a member of the Royal Society, the National Academy of Sciences, the American Physical Society and the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

The Computer Measurement Group gives an annual A. A. Michelson Award.

See also

• List of Jewish Nobel laureates
• List of Naval Academy Nobel Laureates

On this wiki

Michelson's interferometry is the most intensively re-examined experimental work catalogued on this wiki. The material below collects what researchers here have written about his experiments and about how they have been read.

The 1887 experiment and its interpretation

The joint experiment with Edward Morley is treated on its own page, the Michelson–Morley experiment. Contributors here divide sharply over what the 1887 apparatus actually showed. Some hold that the result was a genuine null and that the fault lies in the theory of what a null should mean: see Shannon F Fowler, "1887 Michelson and Morley Null Result"; Robert J Bennett, "MMX Null: Voided by the Vacuum"; Mohammad Shafiq Khan, "Michelson-Morley Experiment: A Misconceived & Misinterpreted Experiment"; Thierry De Mees, "The Great Michelson & Morley, Lorentz and Einstein Trap"; and Bent Kargaard Nielsen, "The Michelson and Morley Experiment Once Again!". Classical rederivations of the fringe expectation are given by Victor Nikolayevich Cochetkov, "Explanation of the Results of the Michelson Experiments Using Classical Mechanics", and Randy Reukauf, "A Particle Explanation of the Michelson-Morley and Kennedy-Thorndike Experiments".

Others argue the 1887 data were never null at all. Hector A Munera re-analysed the historical runs in "Michelson-Morley Experiments Revisited: Systematic Errors, Consistency Among Different Experiments, and Compatibility with Absolute Space" and in "An Absolute Space Interpretation of the Non-Null Results of Michelson–Morley and Similar Experiments", and ran his own stationary interferometer near the equator in Bogotá — "Preliminary Observations with a Stationary Michelson-Morley Interferometer Close to the Equator" and "Observation of Highly Significant Correlations Between Earth Motion and Fringe-Shifts in a Stationary Michelson-Morley Experiment During the Period 2003-2005". Related non-null readings come from Jean Pierre Vigier, "Relativistic Interpretation (with Non-Zero Photon Mass) of the Small Ether Drift Velocity Detected by Michelson, Morley and Miller", and Flavio Tabanelli, "Coherence and Continuity of the Non-Null Experimental Results by Michelson, Morley and Miller".

Michelson–Gale–Pearson, 1925

The 1925 Michelson–Gale–Pearson ring interferometer at Clearing, Illinois, is important to researchers here precisely because it did not give a null result: it registered a fringe displacement attributable to the Earth's rotation, closely matching the calculated value. The standard account treats this as a rotational, Sagnac-type effect that both aether theory and special relativity predict, and therefore as no evidence for translational aether drift; the contributors here argue that the contrast between the two experiments is itself the fact needing explanation. See Howard C Hayden and Cynthia Kolb Whitney, "If Sagnac and Michelson-Gale, Why Not Michelson-Morley?"; Antonis Agathangelidis, "Implications of Hafele-Keating, Michelsom-Morley, & Michelson-Gale Experiments" and "Verification of Stokes' 1845 Terrestrial Ether by Re-Interpretation of Experiments"; and Curtis E Renshaw, "Fresnel, Fitzeau, Hoek, Michelson-Morley, Michelson-Gale and Sagnac in Aetherless Galilean Space".

Michelson's own view of the aether

Michelson himself did not read the 1887 result as the refutation of the aether that later textbook accounts made of it. He continued aether-drift work for the rest of his life, including the Mount Wilson runs with Francis Pease and Fred Pearson described above, and continued to speak of the aether as a physical medium. This wiki's Aether and Lorentz ether theory pages, together with History of special relativity and Preferred frame, set out the historical positions; Joseph Levy's "Is the aether entrained by the motion of celestial bodies, what do the experiments tell us?" reviews the entrainment question that Michelson repeatedly returned to.

Dayton Miller and Mount Wilson

Dayton C Miller continued the interferometer programme at Mount Wilson for more than three decades and reported a small but persistent non-null residual, around 8–10 km/s. Whether that residual was real remains disputed. The 1955 reanalysis by Robert S. Shankland and collaborators attributed it to temperature gradients and statistical scatter, and this is the majority position in physics. Researchers here who argue the residuals were physical include Reginald T Cahill, whose "Michelson-Morley Experiments Revisited and the Cosmic Background Radiation Preferred Frame", "The Detection of Absolute Motion: From 1887-2005", "Absolute Motion and Gravitational Effects" and "Dynamical 3-Space: A Review" argue that gas-mode interferometers such as Miller's and Illingworth's retain a refractive-index-dependent signal that vacuum instruments do not, and that the recovered speeds agree with the cosmic background radiation dipole; James DeMeo, who has defended Miller's experimental care (see "A Dynamic and Substantive Cosmological Ether" and "Practical Applications of Aether Theory: Biological and Atmospheric Experiments"); Glen W Deen, "D. C. Miller's 1933 Cosmic Ether Model" and "D. C. Miller's Ether Wind Velocity Predicts Rotation of the CMBR Anistropy Vector of ca. 27 Arc Minutes per Year"; and Maurice Allais, whose own anomaly work is described at Allais Effect. Miller's page records his own rejection of the thermal explanation during his lifetime.

Modern precision tests

It should be stated plainly that modern repetitions using cryogenic optical resonators and rotating cavity experiments report isotropy of the speed of light to the order of one part in 10¹⁸ — far null results, and the strongest such constraints available. Contributors here respond in different ways: Cahill's gas-mode argument explicitly predicts that vacuum-based instruments must be null, so on that reading the modern bounds do not test the same quantity; others accept the modern results and locate the dispute in the interpretation of the historical data instead. Further experimental claims and rebuttals are gathered under Wilbur Silvertooth ("Experimental Detection of the Ether"), Stefan Marinov, Roland DeWitte, Eugene I Shtyrkov ("Observation of Ether Drift in Experiments with Geostationary Satellites") and Ronald R Hatch ("In Search of an Ether Drift").

See also Speed of Light, Length Contraction and the categories Aether and Relativity.

References

• Livingston, D. M. (1973). The Master of Light: A Biography of Albert A. Michelson. ISBN 0-226-48711-3. 
• Levy, Harriet Lane (1996). 920 O'Farrell Street. Berkeley: Heyday Books. ISBN 0-930588-91-6. 

External links

• National Academy of Sciences Biographical Memoir
• Michelson's Life and Works from the American Institute of Physics
• U.S. Naval Academy and The Navy
• USNA Guide to the Albert A. Michelson Collection, 1803–1989
• From USNA to Nobel: Albert A. Michelson's Life and Contributions
• Michelson House at the University of Chicago
• Michelson's Nobel Prize Biography
• Works by Albert A. Michelson at Project Gutenberg
• IMDB: Bonanza episode Look to the Stars
• Norman Maclean: "Billiards Is a Good Game": Gamesmanship and America's First Nobel Prize Scientist; reprinted in Lapham's Quarterly
• The U.S. Naval Academy Observatory Programs and Times Gone By: A Tale of Two Domes
• "NAWS China Lake". Retrieved September 3, 2010. 
• Nineteenth Century Astronomy at the U.S. Naval Academy