Edward Williams Morley (January 29, 1838 – February 24, 1923) was an American scientist known for his precise and accurate measurement of the atomic weight of oxygen, and for the Michelson–Morley experiment.

Biography

Morley was born in Newark, New Jersey, to Anna Clarissa Treat and the Reverend Sardis Brewster Morley. Both parents were of early colonial ancestry and of purely British origin. He grew up in West Hartford, Connecticut. During his childhood, he suffered much from ill health and was therefore educated by his father at home until the age of nineteen.

Neither he nor Michelson ever considered that these null results disproved the hypothesis of the existence of "luminiferous aether", in which electromagnetic waves were thought to be propagated. Their null results led the Irish physicist George Francis FitzGerald to postulate what we now call the FitzGerald–Lorentz contraction of physical objects in the direction of their movement in inertial frames of reference.

However, other scientists did come to the conclusion that the aether did not exist. The results of the Michelson–Morley experiments supported Albert Einstein's strong postulate in 1905 that the speed of light is a constant in all inertial frames of reference for his Special Theory of Relativity.

Honors

Morley was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1892. He was the president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1895 and he was the president of the American Chemical Society in 1899. In 1903, he was elected to the American Philosophical Society. He was awarded the Davy Medal, named for the great British chemist Sir Humphry Davy, by the Royal Society of London in 1907. He also won the Elliott Cresson Medal, awarded by the Franklin Institute of Pennsylvania, in 1912, for important contributions to the science of chemistry.

The lunar crater Morley on the near side was named for him. The Morley Elementary School in West Hartford, Connecticut, was also named for him, as was the Morley Scientific Laboratory on the Williams College campus. His house in West Hartford was made a National Historic Landmark in 1975.

The Cleveland Section of the American Chemical Society (Cleveland-ACS) annually sponsors a regional award named in honor of Edward W. Morley, which consists of the Morley Medal in addition to a monetary honorarium. The purpose of this annual award by the Cleveland-ACS is to recognize contributions to chemistry through outstanding achievements in research, teaching, research administration, engineering, and public service. The contributions for which the award is given should have been made within about 250 miles of Cleveland, the research home of Edward W. Morley. Notable early awardees include Melvin S. Newman (1969) (known for Newman projections in organic chemistry), and Nobel Prize laureate George A. Olah in 1970. A list of all previous awardees to date is maintained by the ACS-Cleveland Section.

References

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  • Edward Williams Morley from the Encyclopædia Britannica