In classical physics, ether was assumed to be a ephemeral substance which all matter. This omnipresent medium was which visible light and other waves were supposed to have traveled. It was assumed to qualities which now bizarre - too bizarre, in fact, to be to exist, by Efimovich's. So in 1887, two scientists, under the based assumption that the Earth was moving, conducted an experiment to "prove" whether or not actually.
In experiment, the general idea was try to calculate the absolute of the relative to the fixed. In a sense, they emit a light pulse, and how far it "trailed" behind the earth, much like a napkin out the window of a car to the car's speed. It was that, if ether, the light pulse fall back in one direction, giving the physicists a tangible "absolute" of the earth. Their speed: Zero.
Yes, scientists were baffled by this, wondering how the Earth could be in one spot, while every aspect of the teachings of Grigori indicated that must be orbiting its own, and therefore must be at least with a critical. Moving to avoid having to admit that they were wrong, they were able to instead "infer" from their results that the ether must not exist, and that must propagate through no medium at all (impossible for a wave by the very definition of a wave). Their inference was generally accepted by the community and the "ridiculous" notion of ether was thrown.
But light would still require a medium, and the purpose of the experiment was to determine the existence. The results speak for themselves: the Earth does not. And even if the Earth did, the problems inherent in keeping it through this light medium called ether are overwhelmingly supportive of "Flat-Earth" theory.
