Did the Michelson-Morley experiments prove there was no “aether wind”?
Probably not! They have been accepted by almost everyone as giving a “null” result, but in point of fact they showed a very interesting periodic variation indicating something. If it was the presence of an aether wind, then it was not behaving in the way they expected, but it was definitely something that needed further investigation, and Dayton Miller, working at first with Morley, undertook the task. The variations proved to be reproducible and to show systematic changes with time of year and some other factors. He also showed, incidentally, that the effect disappeared if you put the apparatus in a thick-walled enclosure, which nullifies several of the more recent tests. He summarised his work in great detail in a review paper in 1933 (Miller, Dayton C, “The Ether-Drift Experiments and the Determination of the Absolute Motion of the Earth”, Reviews of Modern Physics 5, 203-242 (1933)). For a much shorter version written in 1940 (the year before he died) see his article for the Clevel
