Michelson’s legend in a poem

Albert Abraham Michelson was a celebrated American experimental physicist. He was associated with one of the most famous experiments in physics : Michelson-Morley Experiment, which formed an important input for Einstein’s special theory of relativity.

Recently, I discussed about this experiment in one of my podcasts.

Michelson’s ability to design and develop optical instruments including the interferometer named after him, was one of vital elements in his legendary pursuit to measure velocity of light. He continued to refine this measurement over a period of 40 years or so.

He was also the first American to win a Nobel prize in science (physics, 1907). Americans adored him, and he shot up to fame with his ingenious experiments and became a folklore of United States.

There is a very nice historical account of the Michelson-Morley-Miller experiment in the book titled : The Ethereal Aether; a History of the Michelson-Morley-Miller Aether-Drift Experiments, 1880-1930. by Swenson, Loyd S. published in 1972.

(Yes, you read it right, there was another guy called Dayton Miller who played a critical role in refining the experiment initiated by Michelson and Morley )

In Swenson’s book, there are two stanzas from a poem by Edwin Herbert Lewis that highlights Michelson’s legend. Below I reproduce the same :

But in Kyerson rainbows murmur the music of heavenly things.
Is not this stranger than heaven that a man should hear around
The whole of earth and the half of heaven and see the shadow of sound?
He gathereth up the iris from the plunging of planet’s rim
With bright precision of fingers that Uriel envies him.
But when from the plunging planet he spread out a hand to feel
How fast the ether drifted back through flesh or stone or steel
The fine fiducial fingers felt no ethereal breath. They penciled the night in a cross of light and found it still as death.
Have the stars conspired against him? Do measurements only seem?
Are time and space but shadows enmeshed in a private dream?

But dreaming or not, he measured. He made him a rainbow bar,
And first he measured the measures of man, and then he measured a star.
Now tell us how long is the metre, lest fire should steal it away?
Ye shall fashion it new, immortal, of the crimson cadmium ray.
Now tell us how big is Antares, a spear-point in the night?
Four hundred million miles across a single point of light.
He has taught a world to measure. They read the furnace and gauge
By lines of the fringe of glory that knows nor aging nor age.
Now this is the law of Ryerson and this is the price of peace-
That men shall learn to measure or ever their strife shall cease.

E.H. Lewis

Indeed humans shall learn to measure or ever their strife shall cease…