How did Einstein come up with special relativity?Īccording to Einstein, in his 1949 book ' Autobiographical Notes (opens in new tab)' (Open Court, 1999, Centennial Edition), the budding physicist began questioning the behavior of light when he was just 16 years old. That meant it couldn't be explained by classical mechanics. If the speed of light didn't change despite the Earth's movement through the ether, they concluded, there must be no such thing as ether to begin with: Light in space moved through a vacuum. Michelson and chemist Edward Morley calculated how Earth's motion through the ether affected how the speed of light is measured, and unexpectedly found that the speed of light is the same no matter what Earth's motion is.

In 1887, wrote astrophysicist Ethan Siegal in the Forbes science blog, Starts With a Bang, physicist Albert A. Researchers set about trying to detect that mysterious ether, hoping to understand it better. To shoehorn the odd behavior of light into Newton's framework for physics scientists in the 1800s supposed that light must be transmitted through some medium, which they called the 'luminiferous ether.' That hypothetical ether had to be rigid enough to transfer light waves like a guitar string vibrates with sound, but also completely undetectable in the movements of planets and stars. But some things couldn't be explained by Newton's work: For example, light.

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