http://twistedphysics.typepad.com/about.html
"I'm a former English major turned science writer, through serendipitous accident: I stumbled into writing about physics, drifted further and further into the field, then woke up one day and exclaimed, "Hey! I'm a science writer!"
http://twistedphysics.typepad.com/cocktail_party_physics/2008/06/seeing-the-ligh.html
Jennifer Ouellette the science writer: "He teamed up with a chemist named Edward Morley to refine his basic prototype apparatus. In the seminal experiment, the light as reflected back and forth along the arms repeatedly. The entire apparatus was housed in a closed room in the basement of a stone building to shut out vibrations and variations in temperature (which might cause the brass arms to expand or contract), and they placed the experiment on a large block of marble floating in a pool of mercury to further reduce vibrations. To their surprise, there were no interference effects at all. In essence, the speed of the earth through the aether was, for all intents and purposes, zero. So there was no need for an aether at all, and furthermore, the speed of light in a vacuum appeared to be independent of the speed of the observer."
Obviously Jennifer Ouellette the science writer has been misled by silly Einsteinians such as Stephen Hawking. If she had bumped into the writings of clever Einsteinians such as John Norton the situation could be different:
http://www.hawking.org.uk/lectures/dice.html
Stephen Hawking: "Interestingly enough, Laplace himself wrote a paper in 1799 on how some stars could have a gravitational field so strong that light could not escape, but would be dragged back onto the star. He even calculated that a star of the same density as the Sun, but two hundred and fifty times the size, would have this property. But although Laplace may not have realised it, the same idea had been put forward 16 years earlier by a Cambridge man, John Mitchell, in a paper in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society. Both Mitchell and Laplace thought of light as consisting of particles, rather like cannon balls, that could be slowed down by gravity, and made to fall back on the star. But a famous experiment, carried out by two Americans, Michelson and Morley in 1887, showed that light always travelled at a speed of one hundred and eighty six thousand miles a second, no matter where it came from. How then could gravity slow down light, and make it fall back."
http://www.time.com/time/time100/poc/magazine/a_brief_history_of_rela6a.html
Stephen Hawking: "But Michelson and Morley found no daily or yearly differences between the two beams of light. It was as if light always traveled at the same speed relative to you, no matter how you were moving."
http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/archive/00001743/02/Norton.pdf
John Norton: "Einstein regarded the Michelson-Morley experiment as evidence for the principle of relativity, whereas later writers almost universally use it as support for the light postulate of special relativity......THE MICHELSON-MORLEY EXPERIMENT IS FULLY COMPATIBLE WITH AN EMISSION THEORY OF LIGHT THAT CONTRADICTS THE LIGHT POSTULATE."
Pentcho Valev
pvalev@yahoo.com