Several years ago I wrote in Musings that we could attribute the failure of the Michelson-Morley experiments to the fact that the experimental setup involved a two-way measurement of light speed. In a simple analogy, this is similar to trying to measure the speed of a river flow by recording the time for a boat to go upstream a known distance and back at a constant speed through the water and only recording the time after the round trip. If either the upstream or the downstream time was recorded, the speed of the medium could be determined. Now, I further speculate that measurements which involve a continuous source of radiation and receivers on the same platform[Earth] cannot detect motion through an æther. However. Motion of a platform can be measured using pulsed radiation …if… the radiated pulse travels at a constant speed independent of the motion of the source. This presents the question:
Is a constant speed of propagation, independent of source motion, sufficient to prove the presence of a medium?
