Remarkably, and despite his findings, when the twentieth century dawned Michelson counted himself among those who believed that the work of science was nearly at an end, with "only a few turrets and pinnacles to be added, a few roof bosses to be carved," in the words of a writer in Nature.
令人注目的是，盡管他有了這項發現，當20世紀來到的時候，邁克爾遜覺得自己和別人一樣，認為科學工作快要走到盡頭——用一位作者在《自然》雜志上的話來說：“只要添上幾個角樓和尖頂，在房頂上刻幾處浮雕就夠了。”
In fact, of course, the world was about to enter a century of science where many people wouldn’t understand anything and none would understand everything. Scientists would soon find themselves adrift in a bewildering realm of particles and antiparticles, where things pop in and out of existence in spans of time that make nanoseconds look plodding and uneventful, where everything is strange. Science was moving from a world of macrophysics, where objects could be seen and held and measured, to one of microphysics, where events transpire with unimaginable swiftness on scales far below the limits of imagining. We were about to enter the quantum age, and the first person to push on the door was the so-far unfortunate Max Planck.
當然，實際上，世界即將進入一個科學的世紀。到時候，誰都會懂得一點，誰都不會什么都懂。科學家快要發現自己在粒子和反粒子的汪洋大海里漂浮，東西瞬間存在，瞬間消失，使毫微秒時間也顯得十分緩慢，平平常常，一切都是那么古怪?？茖W正從宏觀物理學向微觀物理學轉變。前者，物體看得見，摸得著，量得出；后者，事情倏忽發生，快得不可思議，完全超出了想像的范圍。我們快要進入一個量子時代，而推動其大門的第一人就是那位迄今為止一直很倒霉的馬克斯·普朗克。
In 1900, now a theoretical physicist at the University of Berlin and at the somewhat advanced age of forty-two, Planck unveiled a new “quantum theory,” which posited that energy is not a continuous thing like flowing water but comes in individualized packets, which he called quanta. This was a novel concept, and a good one. In the short term it would help to provide a solution to the puzzle of the Michelson-Morley experiments in that it demonstrated that light needn’t be a wave after all. In the longer term it would lay the foundation for the whole of modern physics. It was, at all events, the first clue that the world was about to change.
1900年，普朗克42歲，已是柏林大學的理論物理學家。他揭示了一種新的“量子理論”，該理論認為，能量不是一種流水般連續的，而是一包包地傳送的東西，他稱其為量子。這確實是一種新奇的概念，而且是一種很好的概念。從短期來說，它能為邁克爾遜-莫雷實驗之謎提供一種解釋，因為它表明光原來不一定是一種波動。從長遠來說，它將為整個現代物理學奠定基礎。無論如何，它是第一個跡象，表明世界快要發生變化。
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