YouSaid · the spoken record

Michael Nielsen

lines on the record: 105
first: 2026-04-07
most recent: 2026-04-07
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Yeah, so I mean, it certainly doesn't show that ideas about falsification are wrong, are falsified, but it does show the sort of the most naive ideas things are often much more complicated than you think. So Michaelson did this experiment in 1881. He was a very young man, and then other people, I think Rayleigh was one of them, pointed out that there were some problems with the way he did it. So they had to redo it in 1887.”
2026-04-07 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Michael Nielsen – How science actually progresses · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, for longer than that, he conducted them, I think the first one was in 1881, but he continued to believe until, I mean, he died, he died, I think, was like 1929 or so. It was like the late 20s. And he was still doing experiments in the 1920s, sort of about whether or not the ether existed. And so he continued to believe in the aether to the end of his life. Or I think the last public statement he made is like a year or two before he died and he still believed, basically believed at that point”
2026-04-07 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Michael Nielsen – How science actually progresses · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Earth is passing through maybe this ether wind, and if it is passing through the ether wind, sort of this background, and you shoot a light beam sort of parallel to the direction the ether wind is going in, it'll get accelerated a little bit. And if it's being passed back sort of in the opposite direction, it'll get slowed down a little bit and you should be able to see this in the results of interference experiments. And what they found, much to their surprise, I think was that in fact there was no etherwind. And that ruled out some theories of the ether, but not all. And Michaelson certainly continued to believe in the ether.”
2026-04-07 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Michael Nielsen – How science actually progresses · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And Molly thought they were doing they thought they were testing different theories of what was called the ether. So if you get back to the 1600s, Robert Boyle introduced the idea of the ether. And basically the idea of the ether is we know that sound is vibrations in the air and then Boyle and other people got interested in the question of like is light vibrations in something and they couldn't figure out what it was. Boyle actually did an experiment where he tested whether or not you could propagate light through a vacuum. He found that you could, you couldn't do it with sound. So he introduced this idea of the ether and then for the next 200 or so years people had all these kind of conversations about what the ether was and what its nature was. And the Michelson and Morley experiment was really an experiment to test different theories of the ether against one another and in particular to find out whether or not there was a so-called ether wind. So the idea was that the”
2026-04-07 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Michael Nielsen – How science actually progresses · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Okay, yeah, so Michael Simmolle is one of the famous results often presented as this experiment that was done in the 1880s and that helped Einstein come up with the special theory of relativity a little bit later. So sort of changing the way we think about space and time and our fundamental conception of those things. And there's kind of a big gap, I think, between the way Michaelson and Morley and other people at the time thought about the experiment and certainly the way in which Einstein thought or did not think about the experiment. In actual fact, he stated later in his life he wasn't even sure whether he was aware of the paper at the time. There's a lot of evidence that he probably was aware of the paper at the time, but it actually wasn't dispositive for his thinking at all, something else completely was going on. So what much”
2026-04-07 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Michael Nielsen – How science actually progresses · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source