"The strangest explanation [for the Michelson–Morley experiment] was put forth by an Irish physicist, George Francis Fitzgerald. Perhaps, he said, the ether wind puts pressure on a moving object, causing it to shrink a bit in the direction of motion. To determine the length of a moving object, its length at rest must be multiplied by the following simple formula, in which \scriptstyle v^2 is the velocity of the object multiplied by itself, \scriptstyle c^2 is the velocity of light multiplied by itself: \scriptstyle \sqrt{1-\frac{v^2}{c^2}}."
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Martin Gardner, Relativity Simply Explained (1962) Ch. 2 The Michelson-Morley Experiment.
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