I believe you want to start with the Michelson-Morley experiment, and the reasons why it failed. Modern physics, so far as anyone has explained it to me, seems

I believe you want to start with the Michelson-Morley experiment, and the reasons why it failed. Modern physics, so far as anyone has explained it to me, seems to be two partial responses to the results of that experiment (and the behavior of their test device, the interferometer) that we're in the process of synthesizing in to one result. Wikipedia reasonably outlines the main features that modern physics has to account for, and links out to the two main bodies of work. The problem is once you get away from those broad properties the model has to satisfy, there's several competing inplementations with somewhat different features/explanatory power.