Special Rel M7S4 (1 Viewer)

[Sylvia Plarth]

Hillo,

I just wondering is Michelson-Morley still in syllabus, like I cant rlly understand the syllabus officially. Can they ask qs directly about the set up and stuff, or can they ask for evidence and we can choose to mention it. Thanks

 

[wizzkids]

No, Michelson-Morley is not explicitly in the syllabus. You can't be asked questions about this experiment. The whole "luminiferous ether" model has been removed. I can only guess that their reasoning was because this experiment produced a null result, and it was not referred to by Einstein in his 1905 paper on The Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies (that's the one that contained special relativity theory).

 

[liamkk112]

Hillo,

I just wondering is Michelson-Morley still in syllabus, like I cant rlly understand the syllabus officially. Can they ask qs directly about the set up and stuff, or can they ask for evidence and we can choose to mention it. Thanks

they wouldn’t ever ask a direct question about the experiment, so you aren’t required to know it in detail. however you can use it as evidence in certain questions, mostly because it prompted exploration of ideas like length contraction and how reference frames affect observation that influenced the development of special relativity, so if they ever ask something like “describe how an experiment in physics lead to the development of physical laws or theories” you could use it. but overall it’s incredibly niche and u really shouldn’t have to use it (at least in hsc, internals are different), it is good to know to inform your knowledge of different theories of light though