How a 130-Year-Old Technology Led to a Nobel Prize

In 1887, Albert Michelson built an

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experiment that he hoped would lead to the detection of luminiferous ether. At the time, physicists believed that the ether permeated the universe and served as the medium through which light waves moved, like the way waves traveled across the ocean.*

The experiment turned out to be a failure. The mystical ether didn’t exist. But the instrument that Michelson invented to conduct this research would detect, more than a century later, a very real, very significant astronomical phenomenon: gravitational waves, the ripples in the fabric of space and time, coming from a violent collision between two black holes.

https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2017/10/ligo-nobel-prize-gravitational-waves/541842/