In the late 1800s when James Clerk Maxwell realized that light was an electromagnetic wave, his equations showed that light’s speed should be about 300,000 kilometers per second—close to the value experimenters had measured. A nagging loose end was that his equations left unanswered the question: 300,000 kilometers per second relative to what? Scientists pursued the makeshift resolution that an invisible substance permeating space, the “aether,” provided the unseen standard of rest. But in the early twentieth century, Einstein argued that scientists needed to take Maxwell’s equations more
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