In 1887 two scientists named Michelson and Morley performed an experiment somewhat similar to our hypothetical hamster situation (albeit without the hamster). They shot a beam of light and split it into two perpendicular directions. Then they measured if the two resulting beams took the same amount of time to bounce off a mirror and return to their starting point. Like Bertha the hamster, they found that light took the same amount of time to travel in any direction. And because the Earth is moving at some unknown speed relative to the rest of the universe, they concluded that the speed of
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