Over a period spanning 1978 to 1994, Barbara and Hans Haubold at the Vienna International Centre, Austria, talked with Dorothy about her father’s research. In this paper, they aim to reconstruct Dorothy’s contributions to our knowledge of Michelson’s life. First thought up by Isaac Newton, ‘luminiferous ether’ was long believed to be an all-pervading, invisible fluid that engulfed the entire universe.
At first, Newton used this seemingly magical medium as a crutch to lean on whenever his theory of light – he hypothesised that light is made up of tiny particles, also known as corpuscular theory – appeared to falter. As time passed by, Newton’s theory of light eventually lost steam, especially when Thomas Young famously demonstrated the wave-like nature of light in 1801. However, this new theory only made the existence of the ether even more necessary: after all, waves need a medium to travel through.
