Skulls in the Stars: Lord Kelvin vs. the Aether! (1901)

[T]hese speculations resulted in a number of interesting results. For instance, we have noted previously that Earnshaw’s theorem (1839), an important result in electromagnetic theory, arose from an attempt to determine the forces that hold the aether together. In 1902, Lord Rayleigh attempted to detect the aether-induced “length contraction” by measuring the birefringence of moving objects, an ingenious attempt that gave a negative result.

In the broadest sense, a “good” theory is one which raises interesting questions that may inevitably be tested by experiment. Even if it proves to be fundamentally incorrect in the end, it has spurred numerous theoretical and experimental results.

OK, not really.

Dec. 30, 1924: Hubble Reveals We Are Not Alone

Hubble used Leavitt’s formula to calculate that Andromeda was approximately 860,000 light years away. That’s more than eight times the distance to the farthest stars in the Milky Way. This conclusively proved that the nebulae are separate star systems and that our galaxy is not the universe.

Cosmic though it was, the news did not make the front page of The New York Times. The paper did notice the following Feb. 25 that Hubble and a public health researcher split a $1,000 prize ($12,000 in today’s money) from the American Academy for the Advancement of Science.