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  • Nautilus

    The Comforting Certainty of Unanswered Questions

    by Richard Panek Jul 08, 2013 3 minutes

    Light was thought to travel through aether like waves on a lakeShutterstock

    ou might know the anecdote. In April 1900, Lord Kelvin, one of the most prominent physicists of the 19th century, stands in the speaker’s well of the Royal Society in London. Surveying the state of scientific knowledge at the dawn of a new century, he declares the sky to be clear as far as the eye can see, with the exception of two pesky “clouds.” “Cloud No. 1” is physicists’ inability to detect the , the lake-like medium along which waves of electromagnetism must presumably travel. “Cloud No. 2” is physicists’ inability to keep the predicted energy from a black body, a hypothetical cavity that absorbs all the light that falls on it, from reaching infinity. Suffice to say that to whisk away , and .

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