Lorentz-FitzGerald contraction The Irish physicist G.F. FitzGerald and the Dutch physicist H.A. Lorentz tried to account for the null result of the Michelson- Morley experiment by the conjecture that movement through the ether sets up a strain that causes contraction along the line of motion by the factor 1 - 1 2 v2/c2. Show that this hypothesis can account for the absence of fringe shift in the Michelson-Morley experiment. (The hypothesis was disproved in 1932 by experimenters who used an interferometer with unequal arms.)