Einstein’s Theory of Special Relativity

Before Einstein’s proposal of relativity, astronomers relied on Newton’s three laws of motion to explain the mechanics of the universe. Newton’s laws, however, failed to explain the mechanics of light. Scientists in the 1800s, in an attempt to explain the extraordinary behavior of light, believed that its transmission must have occurred through a medium they called the luminiferous ether. In an attempt to prove its existence, American scientists Albert Michelson and Edward Morley built an interferometer, a device that splits a beam of light, allowing the two parts to bounce off mirrors and arrive at a detector. If the ether existed, the time taken for the beams of light to arrive at the detector would differ based on whether the light was moving in the direction of or perpendicular to Earth’s motion. Michelson and Morley, much to their surprise, found that regardless of which way the light traveled relative to the Earth, the time taken to reach the detector, and therefore its speed, was the same, effectively disproving the existence of the luminiferous ether. <a href="https://medium.com/@ayushtripathi0905/einsteins-theory-of-special-relativity-an-overview-8fcba1a75e13">Learn More</a>