James Clerk Maxwell

Then, over a period of years in the 1860s, Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell developed Faraday’s thinking into a mathematical framework that explained the intimate and mysterious relation among electricity, magnetism, and light.

The result was a set of equations describing both electric and magnetic forces as manifestations of the same physical entity, the electromagnetic field. Maxwell had unified electricity and magnetism into one force. Moreover, he showed that electromagnetic fields could propagate through space as a wave.

The speed of that wave is governed by a number that appeared in his equations, which he calculated from experimental data that had been measured a few years earlier. To his astonishment the speed he calculated equaled the speed of light, which was then known experimentally to an accuracy of 1%.

He had discovered that light itself is an electromagnetic wave!

Today the equations that describe electric and magnetic fields are called Maxwell’s equations.

Few people have heard of them, but they are probably the most commercially important equations we know. Not only do they govern the working of everything from household appliances to computers, but they also describe waves other than light, such as microwaves, radio waves, infrared light, and X-rays.

All of these differ from visible light in only one respect—their wavelength. Radio waves have wavelengths of a meter or more, while visible light has a wavelength of a few ten-millionths of a meter, and X-rays a wavelength shorter than a hundredmillionth of a meter.

Our sun radiates at all wavelengths, but its radiation is most intense in the wavelengths that are visible to us.

It’s probably no accident that the wavelengths we are able to see with the naked eye are those in which the sun radiates most strongly: It’s likely that our eyes evolved with the ability to detect electromagnetic radiation in that range precisely because that is the range of radiation most available to them.

If we ever run into beings from other planets, they will probably have the ability to “see” radiation at whatever wavelengths their own sun emits most strongly, modulated by factors such as the light-blocking characteristics of the dust and gases in their planet’s atmosphere. So aliens who evolved in the presence of X-rays might have a nice career in airport security.

Maxwell’s equations dictate that electromagnetic waves travel at a speed of about 300,000 kilometers a second, or about 670 million miles per hour. But to quote a speed means nothing unless you specify a frame of reference relative to which the speed is measured.

That’s not something you usually need to think about in everyday life. When a speed limit sign reads 60 miles per hour, it is understood that your speed is measured relative to the road and not the black hole at the center of the Milky Way. But even in everyday life there are occasions in which you have to take into account reference frames.

For example, if you carry a cup of tea up the aisle of a jet plane in flight, you might say your speed is 2 miles per hour. Someone on the ground, however, might say you were moving at 572 miles per hour.

Lest you think that one or the other of those observers has a better claim to the truth, keep in mind that because the earth orbits the sun, someone watching you from the surface of that heavenly body would disagree with both and say you are moving at about 18 miles per second, not to mention envying your air-conditioning.

Maxwell claimed to have discovered the “speed of light” popping out of his equations. The natural question was, what is the speed of light in Maxwell’s equations measured relative to?

It was not relative to the earth. His equations, after all, apply to the entire universe.

The Aether

An alternative answer is that his equations specify the speed of light relative to an undetected medium permeating all space, called the luminiferous ether. The ether was Aristotle’s term for the substance he believed filled all of the universe outside the terrestrial sphere.

This hypothetical ether would be the medium through which electromagnetic waves propagate, just as sound propagates through air.

If the ether existed, there would be an absolute standard of rest (that is, rest with respect to the ether) and hence an absolute way of defining motion as well.

The ether would provide a preferred frame of reference throughout the entire universe, against which any object’s speed could be measured. So the ether was postulated to exist on theoretical grounds.

It set some scientists off to search for a way to study it, or at least to confirm its existence. One of those scientists was Maxwell himself.

If you race through the air toward a sound wave, the wave approaches you faster, and if you race away, it approaches you more slowly.

Similarly, if there were an ether, the speed of light would vary depending on your motion relative to the ether. In fact, if light worked the way sound does, just as people on a supersonic jet will never hear any sound that emanates from behind the plane, so too would travelers racing quickly enough through the ether be able to outrun a light wave.

Working from such considerations, Maxwell suggested an experiment. If there is an ether, the earth must be moving through it as it orbits the sun.

Since the earth is traveling in a different direction in January than, say, in April or July, one should be able to observe a tiny difference in the speed of light at different times of the year—see the figure below.

Maxwell was talked out of publishing his idea in Proceedings of the Royal Society by its editor, who did not think that the experiment would work. But in 1879, shortly before dying at age 48 of painful stomach cancer, Maxwell sent a letter on the subject to a friend.

The letter was published posthumously in the journal Nature where an American physicist named Albert Michelson read it.

Inspired by Maxwell’s speculation, in 1887 Michelson and Edward Morley carried out a very sensitive experiment designed to measure the speed at which the earth travels through the ether.

Their idea was to compare the speed of light in 2 different directions, at right angles.

If the speed of light were a fixed number relative to the ether, the measurements should have revealed light speeds that differed depending on the direction of the beam.

But Michelson and Morley observed no such difference.

The outcome of the Michelson and Morley experiment is clearly in conflict with the model of electromagnetic waves traveling through an ether, and should have caused the ether model to be abandoned.

But Michelson’s purpose had been to measure the speed of the earth relative to the ether, not to prove or disprove the ether hypothesis. What he found did not lead him to conclude that the ether did not exist.

No one else drew that conclusion either.

In fact, the famous physicist Sir William Thomson (Lord Kelvin) said in 1884 that the ether was “the only substance we are confident of in dynamics. One thing we are sure of, and that is the reality and substantiality of the luminiferous ether.”

How can you believe in the ether despite the results of the Michelson-Morley experiment?

People tried to save the model by contrived and ad hoc additions. Some postulated that the earth dragged the ether along with it, so we weren’t actually moving with respect to it.

Dutch physicist Hendrik Antoon Lorentz and Irish physicist George Francis FitzGerald suggested that in a frame that was moving with respect to the ether, probably due to some yet-unknown mechanical effect, clocks would slow down and distances would shrink. In this way, one would still measure light to have the same speed.

Such efforts to save the aether concept continued for nearly 20 years until a remarkable paper by a young and unknown clerk in the patent office in Berne, Albert Einstein.