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What Michelson and Morley did, without actually intending to, was undermine a longstanding belief in something called the luminiferous ether,
邁克爾遜和莫雷所做的——實際上是在無意之中所做的——破壞了長期以來人們對一種所謂光以太的東西的信念。
a stable, invisible, weightless, frictionless, and unfortunately wholly imaginary medium that was thought to permeate the universe.
那是一種穩定、看不見、沒有重量、沒有摩擦力、不幸又完全是想像出來的媒質。據認為，這種媒質充滿宇宙。
Conceived by Descartes, embraced by Newton, and venerated by nearly everyone ever since,
以太是笛卡兒假設的，牛頓加以接受，之后差不多人人都對它懷有崇敬之情，
the ether held a position of absolute centrality in nineteenth-century physics as a way of explaining how light traveled across the emptiness of space.
在19世紀物理學中占有絕對的中心地位，用來解釋為什么光能夠在空蕩蕩的太空里傳播。
It was especially needed in the 1800s because light and electromagnetism were now seen as waves, which is to say types of vibrations.
它在19世紀初尤其必不可少，因為光和電磁在這時候被看成是波，也就是說某種振動。
Vibrations must occur in something; hence the need for, and lasting devotion to, an ether.
振動必須在什么東西里面才能發生，因此，就需要一種以太，并長期認為存在一種以太。
As late as 1909, the great British physicist J. J. Thomson was insisting:
直到1909年，偉大的英國物理學家J.J.湯姆森仍堅持說：
“The ether is not a fantastic creation of the speculative philosopher; it is as essential to us as the air we breathe.”
“以太不是哪位愛好思索的哲學家的憑空想像，它對我們來說就像我們呼吸的空氣那樣不可缺少?！?/div>
This more than four years after it was pretty incontestably established that it didn’t exist.
他說這番話4年多以后，就無可爭議地確定以太并不存在。
People, in short, were really attached to the ether.
總而言之，人們確實離不開以太。
