Science thrives on inquiry, and scientists must often reevaluate their firmly held beliefs. In his article titled "The Past and Present Status of the Ether" appearing in the August 1910 edition of Popular Science Monthly, professor Arthur Gordon Webster of Clark University addressed the anxiety caused by widespread reevaluarion: "many persons believe that physics is now undergoing a sort of crisis, in which many of our most cherished ideas are about to be relegated to the scrap-heap." One such idea was the belief in an interplanetary vaporous ether, which was, Webster noted, '"becoming unfashionable.1' As the decade progressed more and more scientists came to realize that the reason they were having trouble detecting the elusive interplanetary ether was that it did not exist. Indeed, as early as 1887 American physicists Albert Michelson and E. W. Morleyhad conducted an experiment — known as the...