Michelson-Morley Non-Null Results

MSimon · Post by **MSimon** » Thu Jan 07, 2010 9:32 am

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7T0d7o8X2-E

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I got alerted to this from here:

the year that

Which is one of those ZPE types.

The experiment is interesting.

alexjrgreen · Post by **alexjrgreen** » Thu Jan 07, 2010 10:47 am

Which way is the "aether" flowing - towards the centre of the earth or away from it?

George Gabriel Stokes' criticised the Michelson-Morley experiment on the grounds that it assumed the "aether" had no viscosity.

Jccarlton · Post by **Jccarlton** » Thu Jan 07, 2010 12:39 pm

The experiment is interesting, but the man's technique sucks dead bunnies. In optics the killer when are taking measurements like this is vibration. Which is why you put interferometers on expensive vibration separated optical tables and get very obsessive about sources of vibration in the air, or the case around the interferometer. That rig put an enormous amount of undamped vibration into the measurement. What you are seeing is an artifact of that vibration, not new physics.

alexjrgreen · Post by **alexjrgreen** » Thu Jan 07, 2010 1:12 pm

At first I thought that, too.

The fringes don't move in the horizontal experiment, so his rig is better than it looks.

Any university optics lab should be able to reproduce the experiment.

Skipjack · Post by **Skipjack** » Thu Jan 07, 2010 1:27 pm

Expensive film tripods can be very stable and dampen vibrations pretty well (you would be surprised of how bad a little vibration can look with a strong enough zoom). Still, I am not quite sure what this experiment is about, or trying to proof/disproof. If someone can fill me in?

alexjrgreen · Post by **alexjrgreen** » Thu Jan 07, 2010 3:20 pm

The "aether" was the medium formerly assumed to propagate light waves.

If the Earth in its orbit around the Sun is moving with respect to this "aether", then a Doppler shift should be observable in light travelling in different directions which can be detected between the two rays of a split beam of light by movement of the fringes on an interferometer.

However, if this "aether" has viscosity and interacts with matter even slightly, then in the steady state it should appear horizontally stationary at the surface of the Earth.

Skipjack · Post by **Skipjack** » Thu Jan 07, 2010 3:26 pm

Ahh yes, I remember the "aether" theories from the beginning of the century.
Ok, so he wants to demonstrate that there is indeed an aether?

BenTC · Post by **BenTC** » Thu Jan 07, 2010 3:34 pm

Reminds of using a car alternator to produce HHO from water electrolysis to be burnt in the engine to turn the alternator to produce HHO. There is a lot of bad sites promoting this, as well as a lot of Conservation of Energy arguments against it, that made me completely skeptical. A while later I came across an explanation that made some sense. Engines expel a fair amount of unburnt fuel. The hydrogen burns faster to consume the fuel more completely, and that is where the additional "free" energy comes from.

From my laymens perspective I don't believe CoE is overturned, but CoE only makes sense within the bounds of the system. Where it appears that CoE has been overturned, its just that we don't understand the system and have the wrong idea of the proper system boundaries.

Aero · Post by **Aero** » Thu Jan 07, 2010 4:05 pm

Just to let you know - There are about 20 pages of detailed discussion - of the aether, its characteristics and why the experiment might have failed - linked here:
viewtopic.php?t=1739
The meat of the paper actually begins on about page 15, I'm not quite sure why the first 14 pages were written, perhaps to turn the serious reader away?

seedload · Post by **seedload** » Thu Jan 07, 2010 4:19 pm

It is not vibration that is causing this. It is gravity. The rig is undergoing small displacements of the various components due to gravity during their vertical rotation.

regards

Diogenes · Post by **Diogenes** » Thu Jan 07, 2010 4:33 pm

Well, since the topic has been brought up, i'll mention this.

From Einstein Plus Two by Petr Beckmann Professor Emeritus of Electrical Engineering, University of Colorado

Since the velocity of light is a universal constant, light propagates with a constant velocity from west to east (with the rotation of the earth) and east to west (against it).

Right only if one defines, as Einstein does, the velocity of light as a universal constant, and then invokes General Relativity (Special Relativity is not enough) to produce the time dilations and space contractions necessary to explain the experimental evidence: the two light beams, if made to interfere, will produce a fringe shift with respect to a control loop in which the velocities cancel. The explanation by Galileian relativity needs only two or three lines of high-school algebra.
The experiment was performed by Michelson and Gale in 1924 in Clearing, Illinois, in evacuated pipes (glass cannot be used as Fresnel drag would compensate for any difference). With an interference loop 6,246 feet or some 10^14 wavelengths long, it is perhaps the most grandiose interference experiments ever performed; its accuracy still greatly exceeds today's techniques by masers and the Mossbauer effect.
Yet this experiment of fundamental importance, explainable either by the tensors of General Relativity or by the simplicity of the Galileian transformation, rarely makes it into the basic text-books. (sic) Instead, they make the case for Einstein theory by the basic textbooks. Instead, they make the case of the Einstein theory by the Michelson-Morley experiment, which is explainable by no less than four different theories (Einstein, entrained-ether, ballistic, and gravitational).

I think his point is that the Michelson-Gale experiment produced a positive result, which makes it a nuisance to Relativity.

http://www.stephankinsella.com/wp-conte ... terial.pdf

alexjrgreen · Post by **alexjrgreen** » Thu Jan 07, 2010 4:37 pm

seedload wrote:It is not vibration that is causing this. It is gravity. The rig is undergoing small displacements of the various components due to gravity during their vertical rotation.

I was expecting that to be true, but the midpoint is at 45 degrees. Do you have an explanation for this?

Diogenes · Post by **Diogenes** » Thu Jan 07, 2010 4:41 pm

seedload wrote:It is not vibration that is causing this. It is gravity. The rig is undergoing small displacements of the various components due to gravity during their vertical rotation.

regards

Perhaps it is foolish for me to suggest this, but it occurs to me than anyone who has sufficient understanding to create such an experiment, very likely has enough understanding to eliminate this obvious idea as a possibility.

seedload · Post by **seedload** » Thu Jan 07, 2010 4:44 pm

alexjrgreen wrote:
seedload wrote:It is not vibration that is causing this. It is gravity. The rig is undergoing small displacements of the various components due to gravity during their vertical rotation.
I was expecting that to be true, but the midpoint is at 45 degrees. Do you have an explanation for this?

The mirror is horizontal at that point. The affect of flexing changes when the mirror passes horizontal.

seedload · Post by **seedload** » Thu Jan 07, 2010 4:48 pm

Diogenes wrote:
seedload wrote:It is not vibration that is causing this. It is gravity. The rig is undergoing small displacements of the various components due to gravity during their vertical rotation.

regards
Perhaps it is foolish for me to suggest this, but it occurs to me than anyone who has sufficient understanding to create such an experiment, very likely has enough understanding to eliminate this obvious idea as a possibility.

My understanding is that a rotation of the pattern is not even what you would expect if there were an aether. More like a widening of the gaps between bands or similar results.