One last test for ether
A $200,000 experiment is ramping up to test the last possible experimental window for the existence of the ether (a light-carrying medium suffusing all space). The magazine New Scientist is all over this.
If they find any ether at all with this experiment, then Einstein gets replaced with Lorenz, which (I'm pretty sure) means black holes will no longer be possible, because Lorenz's equations don't collapse into singularities. Then both Morphogenetic Fields and Tom Van Flandern's "Meta Theory" become much more plausible in one stroke. Short version: Holy crap. That would be like proving the existence of alchemy, ESP, and magic with a single experiment. Is an ether discovery on the horizon?
We snipped this from the subscription-only New Scientist article:
The Earth is travelling at 30 kilometres per second around the sun, not to mention racing around the centre of the galaxy. So Michelson and Morley reasoned the ether wind should reduce the speed of light travelling in the same direction as the Earth by at least 30 kilometres per second - 0.01 per cent of the speed of light. The experiment was easily sensitive enough to detect an effect of this magnitude. To the disappointment of the experimenters, it did not, and reluctantly they accepted the conclusion that there is no ether.
Many similar experiments have been performed since then: in every case the official conclusion has been the same. But not everyone has swallowed the story. In 1902, William Hicks published a study of the Michelson-Morley experiment, and claimed the results supported the existence of an ether wind blowing over the Earth at 8 kilometres per second. Although the pair had carried out their observations over a number of days, they had then averaged out their results as if the experiment's orientation to a prevailing ether wind had not changed. Hicks pointed out that this would cancel out any effect. Some years later Dayton Miller, a former colleague of Michelson's, reworked the Michelson-Morley measurements and also came out with a speed for the ether wind of about 8 kilometres per second. He then redid the experiment with Morley and obtained the same result, but this time with a much smaller error range.
In 1921 Miller took the result to Einstein, who thought there was probably some mistake. He suggested that Miller's result might be explained by slight temperature differences in the apparatus. "Subtle is the Lord, but malicious he is not," Einstein declared. So Miller repeated the experiment 1800 metres up, on the snowy summit of Mount Wilson in California. "He got exactly the same result as Michelson and Morley in the warm basement of the Case Institute," Consoli says.
According to Consoli, many interferometer experiments carried out over the past century have shown a measurable ether wind. "The textbooks say the experiments produced null results," he says. "The textbooks do not tell the truth."
If they find any ether at all with this experiment, then Einstein gets replaced with Lorenz, which (I'm pretty sure) means black holes will no longer be possible, because Lorenz's equations don't collapse into singularities. Then both Morphogenetic Fields and Tom Van Flandern's "Meta Theory" become much more plausible in one stroke. Short version: Holy crap. That would be like proving the existence of alchemy, ESP, and magic with a single experiment. Is an ether discovery on the horizon?
We snipped this from the subscription-only New Scientist article:
The Earth is travelling at 30 kilometres per second around the sun, not to mention racing around the centre of the galaxy. So Michelson and Morley reasoned the ether wind should reduce the speed of light travelling in the same direction as the Earth by at least 30 kilometres per second - 0.01 per cent of the speed of light. The experiment was easily sensitive enough to detect an effect of this magnitude. To the disappointment of the experimenters, it did not, and reluctantly they accepted the conclusion that there is no ether.
Many similar experiments have been performed since then: in every case the official conclusion has been the same. But not everyone has swallowed the story. In 1902, William Hicks published a study of the Michelson-Morley experiment, and claimed the results supported the existence of an ether wind blowing over the Earth at 8 kilometres per second. Although the pair had carried out their observations over a number of days, they had then averaged out their results as if the experiment's orientation to a prevailing ether wind had not changed. Hicks pointed out that this would cancel out any effect. Some years later Dayton Miller, a former colleague of Michelson's, reworked the Michelson-Morley measurements and also came out with a speed for the ether wind of about 8 kilometres per second. He then redid the experiment with Morley and obtained the same result, but this time with a much smaller error range.
In 1921 Miller took the result to Einstein, who thought there was probably some mistake. He suggested that Miller's result might be explained by slight temperature differences in the apparatus. "Subtle is the Lord, but malicious he is not," Einstein declared. So Miller repeated the experiment 1800 metres up, on the snowy summit of Mount Wilson in California. "He got exactly the same result as Michelson and Morley in the warm basement of the Case Institute," Consoli says.
According to Consoli, many interferometer experiments carried out over the past century have shown a measurable ether wind. "The textbooks say the experiments produced null results," he says. "The textbooks do not tell the truth."
posted by Jim Richardson at 5:59 PM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home