Michelson-Morley Non-Null Results

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alexjrgreen
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Post by alexjrgreen »

seedload wrote:
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.
It's the beam splitter that is horizontal. There are two mirrors, at 90 degrees to each other and both at 45 degrees to the beam splitter.
Ars artis est celare artem.

Diogenes
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Post by Diogenes »

seedload wrote:
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.


I thought a rotation of the bands was exactly what you would be looking for if light traveled faster in one direction than another. Also, the guy claims that the pattern changes depending upon the time of day. If this is true, it would be difficult to reconcile this with a flexing of the mirrors due to weight.

seedload
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Post by seedload »

alexjrgreen wrote:
seedload wrote:
alexjrgreen wrote: 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.
It's the beam splitter that is horizontal. There are two mirrors, at 90 degrees to each other and both at 45 degrees to the beam splitter.
Fair enough, my mistake. But, to be honest, beam splitter or mirrors at 90 degrees or 45 degrees (whichever), you would certainly expect the physics of the flexing/displacement of the rig/components to find those angles to be magic numbers wouldn't you. Enough so that I wouldn't even bother to try to figure out what is being moved which direction.

outie

seedload
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Post by seedload »

Diogenes wrote:
seedload wrote:
Diogenes wrote: 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.


I thought a rotation of the bands was exactly what you would be looking for if light traveled faster in one direction than another. Also, the guy claims that the pattern changes depending upon the time of day. If this is true, it would be difficult to reconcile this with a flexing of the mirrors due to weight.
... or temperature. Really really really tiny displacements.

Notice how he says 11 to 11.5 when he talks about how many bands of rotation he gets. Why would this vary if not related to mechanical displacements?

Diogenes
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Post by Diogenes »

seedload wrote:
Diogenes wrote:
seedload wrote: 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.


I thought a rotation of the bands was exactly what you would be looking for if light traveled faster in one direction than another. Also, the guy claims that the pattern changes depending upon the time of day. If this is true, it would be difficult to reconcile this with a flexing of the mirrors due to weight.
... or temperature. Really really really tiny displacements.

Notice how he says 11 to 11.5 when he talks about how many bands of rotation he gets. Why would this vary if not related to mechanical displacements?


Again, one can only hope that the experimenter is sensible enough to have ruled this out. I guess for a definitive answer we'll have to await for conformation or not, or perhaps someone in the business will be able to explain the effect.

MSimon
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Post by MSimon »

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
Well yes. But I think it is gravity causing a shift in frequency.

I discuss that and the Mossbauer effect (much more sensitive) here:

http://powerandcontrol.blogspot.com/201 ... vered.html

Also some links to discussions of the MM experiments.

BTW Feynman was not entirely satisfied with the explanations of the MM experiment.

What I find most interesting is that we are advanced enough so that science is being put back in the hands of amateurs.
Engineering is the art of making what you want from what you can get at a profit.

seedload
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Post by seedload »

Diogenes wrote:Again, one can only hope that the experimenter is sensible enough to have ruled this out. I guess for a definitive answer we'll have to await for conformation or not, or perhaps someone in the business will be able to explain the effect.
The experimenter is posting on YouTube. Enough said ;)

alexjrgreen
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Post by alexjrgreen »

seedload wrote:The experimenter is posting on YouTube. Enough said ;)
I would expect many more people to do the same.

YouTube seems well suited to publicising an experimental result and inviting people to reproduce it.
Ars artis est celare artem.

MSimon
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Post by MSimon »

Jccarlton wrote: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.
Yeah. When you are trying to resolve a 1/10th of a fringe.

Eleven? Not so critical.
Engineering is the art of making what you want from what you can get at a profit.

Josh Cryer
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Post by Josh Cryer »

He can falsify the experiment simply by changing the orientation of the splitters through various rotating patterns. 5 micro meters (I believe MSimon calculated) is more than enough to allow stresses in the setup to cause very visible fringe movement.

It does seem that his experiment has been picked up by other scientists: http://blog.hasslberger.com/2009/09/ext ... inter.html

The comments suggest that the experiment is broken.
Science is what we have learned about how not to fool ourselves about the way the world is.

DeltaV
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Post by DeltaV »

The comments suggest that the experiment is broken.
If not already found in the literature, this experiment should be redone with stiffer mirror and beam splitter supports, etc., to eliminate structural deformation as the cause of fringe shifts. Various spin axis orientations relative to the earth's spin axis and the local gravity vector, along with different rotation speeds and signs (CW, CCW), should also be examined.

To further muddy the waters...
( http://blog.hasslberger.com/2009/09/ext ... inter.html ) To have qualitative significance, each full rotation in either the vertical or horizontal mode should have shown TWO full periods of shift. That is, we should have seen left-right-left-right shifts. We saw left-right. (Could be right first, it is not of significance.) This is not a trivial matter. If you don't have two full phases, you have nothing.
Two full turns are required for a topologically complete rotation:
viewtopic.php?p=26575&highlight=#26575

Rotation-Reversal Theorem (my crude paraphrase therof):
A final orientation due to successive rotations about selected axes of sequentially rotated frames* (say, psi@z->theta@y'->phi@x'', passive-view) is equivalent to the orientation obtained by same-magnitude rotations about the corresponding axes of a single, fixed reference frame as long as they are done in reverse order (say, phi@x->theta@y->psi@z, active-view).
Moore, E.N., "Theoretical Mechanics", p.155, Wiley, 1983

* [ Say, frames considered fixed to the apparatus, earth, solar system, galaxy, ...]

Roto-elastic aether:
viewtopic.php?p=28022&highlight=#28022

Helius
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Post by Helius »

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
We don't need no Occam's Razor applied here. Lets toss Thermodynamics instead! :?

Josh Cryer
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Post by Josh Cryer »

Helius wrote:We don't need no Occam's Razor applied here. Lets toss Thermodynamics instead! :?
It would be an excellent lesson if the guy who made the video comes back and explains why it is wrong. I am sure he is aware of the objections, but I see no response to them. This reminds me of the perpetual motion stuff where people would debunk the claims but the inventors will just ignore them. (And continue selling their product to suckers.)
Science is what we have learned about how not to fool ourselves about the way the world is.

DeltaV
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Post by DeltaV »

seedload wrote:It is not vibration that is causing this.
Agreed.
seedload wrote:It is gravity. The rig is undergoing small displacements of the various components due to gravity during their vertical rotation.
Need more data. Easy to change the structure mass/stiffness (or, build a second version to test in parallel) and see if the results differ.

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