Albert A. Michelson

Albert A. Michelson was an American physicist who built the Michelson interferometer, a device that splits and recombines a beam of light to detect tiny differences in the distance it travels along two paths. In 1887 he and chemist Edward Morley used the instrument to search for the motion of the Earth through the hypothesized luminiferous aether and found none, a null result that helped clear the way for Einstein's theory of special relativity. Michelson became the first American to win a Nobel Prize in a science, awarded the 1907 Nobel Prize in Physics for his optical precision instruments and the measurements made with them.