Concise History of Relativity

  • 1678: Christiaan Huygens proposes a wave theory of light in which light is wave propagating in a medium

  • 1704: Isaac Newton rejects wave theory and proposes light to be particulate or "corpuscular"

  • 1720: James Bradley discovers stellar aberration which suggests that the earth would have to move through stationary aether in wave theory

  • 1720-1800s: Isaac Newtons criticism of wave theory upon the basis that a medium would "disturb and retard the Motions of those great Bodies" remains dominant

  • 1801: Thomas Young proves via interference experiments that light cannot be particles and particle theories fall into disfavor

  • 1845: Michael Faraday discovers that light propagation in a material can be influenced by external magnetic fields

  • 1851: Hippolyte Fizeau designs an experiment to prove that a moving dispersive medium should create a partial offset in the speed of any light moving through it because of aether drag. It did as predicted.

  • 1861/1864: James Clerk Maxwell, the father of electromagnetism, using his model of a sea of aether vortices he likened to flywheels, derives the primary electromagnetic equations used today. (The form and notation of "Maxwell's Equations" eventually changed but originated in "On physical lines of force")

  • 1887: Michelson and Morely attempt to determine the speed at which the earth moves through the stationary aether and receive a result much smaller than expected, this result is mistakenly called "null" when referred to in subsequent papers but not in the paper itself.

  • 1889: George Fitzgerald suggests "null" result of MMX could be from shrinking of a body due to motion, this idea greatly influences Lorentz

  • 1892-1895: Hendrik Lorentz develops an aether theory specifically to explain the "null" result of MMX by length contraction due to motion through aether (Lorentz Ether Theory) and develops the concept of "local time" to connect systems at rest with those in motion through the aether

  • 1900/1904: Henri Poincaré, using Lorentz's transformations, formulates a theory he names the "principle of relativity" and postulates matter-energy equivalence

  • 1905: Morley and Miller replicate 1887 interferometer experiment only giving significance to east/west reading and then combining day/night readings (opposite phase sine waves) resulting in truly null "results" that both understood later were mistakenly arrived at through miscalculation.

  • 1905: Albert Einstein (a patent clerk) uses the theories and equations of Poincaré, Lorentz, and Maxwell to publish "On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies" (Special Relativity) in which the only novel postulate removes aether and imbues light with magical behaviors.

  • 1913: Georges Sagnac devises an experiment specifically to prove Special Relativity (SR) false; the experiment successfully does so as predicted.

  • 1919: Arthur Eddington plans an expedition to prove relativity and falsely reports that the observations of a solar eclipse precisely match predictions of relativity when they in fact had 30% standard error and ranged from half to double Einstein's predictions. Announcement of this skyrocketed Einstein to international fame overnight.

  • 1922-1933: Dayton Miller replicates MMX with white light in a variety of conditions with differing apparatus and assistants, over 200,000 readings result in reliable non-null effect similar to original MMX. In 1925 Miller was given the Newcomb Cleveland Prize by the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) for the detection of the Aether and this was believed by many to be the reason Einstein never received the Nobel Prize for Special Relativity.

  • 1933: Fritz Zwicky proposes that the reason galaxies rotate far faster than predicted by General relativity is not because GR is incorrect but because there is in fact some magical "Dark Matter" that is undetectable causing things to behave strangely. To this day most astronomers believe the universe is dominated by this never yet observed magical substance.

  • 1948: Heindrick Casimir detects the constant vacuum radiation pressure and unknowingly re-opens Aether research but with a different name: "Zero Point Energy"

  • 1992: National Science Foundation spends $365 million on LIGO facility to detect "gravitational waves" predicted by Einstein. Despite continued operational cost, nothing detected to date...

  • 2002: Ruyong Wang constructs a fiber-optic gyroscope with opposing curves to disprove "rotational effects" explanation of sagnac effect. It proves light constancy false again.

  • 2006: European Space Agency (ESA) conducts rotating superconductor experiments which show an effect one hundred million trillion times larger than predicted by General Relativity

"No amount of experimentation can ever prove me right; a single experiment can prove me wrong." -Albert Einstein