l x i v I N T R O D U C T I O N T O V O L U M E 1 5 lengthy discussion on the topic began in mid-September 1925, when Wien asked Schrödinger “what do you think about the positive result of the Michelson experi- ment?... The observations on the shift of the interference patterns reproduce the motion of the solar system in the universe, in agreement with the latest observa- tions of Strömberg!! It is the most astounding result in physics.” Their exchanges were animated by their efforts to organize German and Swiss experiments designed to replicate Miller’s results. One even detects a certain degree of satisfaction in their anticipation of the forthcoming counterrevolution in physics. Wien wrote: “If the observations are substantiated—as can hardly be doubted any more—the theory of relativity, the special as much as the general one, is finished, and we must go back again to our old ideas of 25 years ago.” In his reply, Schrödinger com- mented on “the hardly noticeable ‘counter-propaganda’ in the Jewish circle of physicists” trying to play down the result, which he decried as unfair to Miller (Mehra and Rechenberg 1987, p. 453). Intriguingly, Schrödinger, who played an active role in organizing facilities for the Swiss-based replications, never men- tioned the Miller experiments or these replication efforts in his correspondence with Einstein in this volume, which occupies the same few months as his corre- spondence on the subject with Wien. It was this triumph of Miller’s that set in motion the most important of the rep- licating experiments. At the end of 1926, Hale informed Einstein that Michelson himself would perform an interferometer experiment atop Mount Wilson (Doc. 425). It would take several years before results were announced, but Michel- son firmly ruled out any inertial motion of the Earth, even a tenth as great as de- manded by the astronomers, whose conclusions were by then firmly established (Michelson, Pease, and Pearson 1929). A key aspect of Miller’s success lay in convincing scientists that his work agreed with Strömberg’s startling new discoveries. In reality, his interferometer measured, at best, a velocity an order of magnitude less than what Strömberg had seen, but Miller could reconcile them by his own determination of the Earth’s direction of motion in the galaxy (Miller 1933), which did not accord with subsequent astro- nomical findings. Furthermore, as pointed out by André Metz (Doc. 157), Miller’s favored ether drag hypothesis was invalidated by Michelson’s large-scale version of the Sagnac experiment, which conclusively proved that interferometry could de- tect the rotational, non-inertial, motion of the Earth (Michelson and Gale 1925). Only the theory of relativity could explain the success of the Michelson-Gale ex- periment combined with the null result of the Michelson-Morley experiment. One other astronomical result played a role in the controversy, pointed out by Eddington and mentioned by Slosson to Einstein (Doc. 12). At the same remark-