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In years to come, these findings would be cited as one of the first proofs this mysterious ether did not exist, that the speed of light was a constant, and that classical physics was not enough to explain the physical universe. His health had begun to deteriorate years before, in what his doctor referred to as the "vile climate of Chicago," where Michelson had taught. While Michelson and Morely were testing the "ether drift," Einstein had begun to speak of clocks that moved backward, mass that was not constant and light made up of things called "photons." For scientists, these heresies were as profound as those of Copernicus, the first to suggest that the earth was an orbiting planet, and not the center of the universe. Above, Albert Einstein and Albert Michelson met at Mount Wilson in 1931, just before Michelson's death. Michelson's last experiment did not go smoothly. The repeated punning allusions to card-playing in this passage leave no doubt as to the reference in the last word. In 1930, that belief may have helped bring Michelson to Santa Ana, for his last and most ambitious test. His daughter, Dorothy Michelson Livingston, wrote that Michelson never gave up his belief in "ether," even though he accepted Einstein's work.

Dorothy Michelson Livingston wrote that her father often worked for days without sleeping or eating, that he sat alone at meals so his thinking would not be disturbed, that in turns he could be arrogant, distant, imperious and rude. At the table in the opulent dining room of James Irvine's Victorian home sat Michelson, James Irvine Sr., James Irvine Jr. and the scientist Robert Millikan. Clark sat and listened, understanding little of what was being said. On the day of his arrival, the pump being used to suck air out of the pipe broke down, halting the project. Athelie Clark, the oldest living member of the family that once owned the gigantic Irvine Ranch, remembers a day in the late 1920s when Michelson came to lunch. Nine talented players with another unfortunately forced to exclude herself due to illness, came together at the Cheltenham Billiards and Snooker Club, now the home of women's competition in Victoria, for what proved to be an enjoyable as well as competitive day.

Billiards is a journey of constant improvement. The two men stood in the lobby arguing with each other, wearing pajamas, scribbling diagrams on the back of a Chinese laundry ticket, What is a billiards club until Michelson noticed that a crowd had gathered. With mirrors, turbines, his interferometer and an arc light, he measured the speed of light to within two miles per second of its currently accepted speed. At the heart of the experiment (pictured in the shack and graphic above), an arc light was bounced off a rapidly rotating set of mirrors, back and forth down a mile-long tube and home, to the mirrors, which by then would have moved slightly. Inside the tubes were a series of mirrors, each on a motorized balancing machine. Clark remembers that the shack was "absolutely spotless" inside. Horace Babcock, the emeritus director of the Mount Wilson observatory, remembers visiting the experiment as a child, seeing the light shooting out of the cracks in the shack where Michelson was at work.

Packie remembers playing him when he was very young and no one else was around. The following passage from the same pamphlet mentions the Crown - probably the Crown Coffee-house - and it has been inferred from this that Hoyle himself might have been one of Lord Folkestone’s party. Roland Nelson (1881-1940), English rower, barrister and private secretary to the First Lord of the Admiralty and the Home Secretary. In 1920, he was the first to measure the diameter of a star, called Betelgeuse, an achievement hailed in The New . In the center of the shack was the interferometer, which Michelson sometimes called his "she devil." At the heart of the machine, a wheel covered with finely-honed mirrors spun at exactly 512 revolutions per second. His daughter described one of those fights, in which an assistant drove to Pasadena and called the physicist to the lobby of the Hotel Maryland. Clark says Michelson settled on the Orange County site for the experiment after lunch in the Irvine family home, when James Irvine Jr. took the physicist for a drive in the family Packard.