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Named after Vernon W. Hughes and Ronald Drever, who independently conducted experiments of this kind in the early 1960s.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.
Hughes-Drever experiment
Today it means: Any of various spectroscopic tests of the isotropy of mass and space, originally to test Mach's principle and now understood to be important tests of Lorentz invariance. Full definition →