Robert Andrews Millikan, another American experimentalist, was in the audience at Chicago during Michelson’s talk and guessed that the “eminent physicist” Michelson referred to was the influential Scot, William Thomson, Lord Kelvin. A friend has told me that when he was a student at Cambridge in the late 1940s, Kelvin was widely quoted as having said that there was nothing new to be discovered in physics and that all that remained was more and more precise measurement.
