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If you are the type of person who keeps up on the latest published studies, you likely see a lot of positive results being reported. Researchers prove this hypothesis or researchers confirm that assumption. But it is not very often at all that you see someone publish a study in which they say that their hypothesis was proven entirely incorrect and that they were wrong.
It is really not surprising since if you are a scientist looking to make a name for yourself (or maintain your good reputation), do you really want to publish the fact that you were dead wrong in a prestigious journal? In addition, if you published a prestigious journal, would you want to ‘waste’ space publishing studies that do nothing but show where a researcher was wrong?
Well, this is such a common thing that it has a name in the academic fields. Publication bias, or sometimes it is called file drawer effect. Publication bias can have a major impact on people’s understanding of science as well because when they read that 5 studies confirm something, they assume that it is ‘settled science’ when in reality, it could be that 20 studies disprove it, but were never published.
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All of that can be highlighted by what is often called the most famous failed experiment in history, and how publishing the failure helped push science forward.
The experiment is called the Michelson-Morley experiment. Without getting into too much detail, the researchers were attempting to prove that aether existed, and how it influenced light. At the time (back in the late 1800’s) it was a common understanding among scientists that light traveled through a luminiferous aether, similar to how sound travels through the air.
In an attempt to prove that this aether existed, and gain an understanding of exactly how the speed of light was effected by it, American physicist Albert A. Michelson and Edward W. Morley came up with a truly ingenious experiment. They set up a series of half-transparent mirrors so that they could send light in two directions at once in order to measure its speed. Their assumption was that the aether ‘wind’ would speed up or slow down the light. The experiment was set up so that if the aether was indeed real, the light along each path would actually cancel each other out. For a more detailed explanation of the experiment, check out this is video:
Well, once they had conducted this experiment multiple times, they found that they were not getting the results they expected. Michelson wrote about it in a letter, saying:
“The Experiments on relative motion of Earth and ether have been completed and the result is decidedly negative. The expected deviation of the interference fringes from the zero should have been 0.40 of a fringe – the maximum displacement was 0.02 and the average much less than 0.01 – and then not in the right place. As displacement is proportional to squares of the relative velocities it follows that if the ether does slip past the relative velocity is less than one sixth of the earth’s velocity.”
They even tried moving the experiment to the top of mountains to get the expected results, but eventually they had to give up. Putting this information out to the scientific community allowed other researchers to move past the theory of aether. Albert Einstein later said of it:
“If the Michelson–Morley experiment had not brought us into serious embarrassment no one would have regarded the relativity theory as a (halfway) redemption.”
So, the bottom line is, even (and sometimes especially) failed experiments offer important data points and should be shared with the world (even if they are a little embarrassing).
If you thought that was interesting, you might like to read about a second giant hole has opened up on the sun’s surface. Here’s what it means.
Categories: SCI/TECH
Tags: · aether, aether experiment, einstein, failed experiments, file drawer effect, Michelson-Morley, publication bias, science, single topic, speed of light, top