To:
letters@newscientist.com
Subject: The
aether lives!
Date: August
22, 2003
The Editor
Dear Sir
Can it be
that the recent experiments (Neil Russell, August 16, p22) searching for
directional properties in "space-time" have been less sensitive than
those of Dayton Miller in the early years of the 20th century? Reading Russell's article, one is led to
suspect that neither he nor any of the other workers concerned have even
*heard* of Miller -- evidence of the success of Einstein and followers'
campaign to discredit him, practically expunging him from the scientific
record. For Miller *did*, as is now
becoming more widely known, demonstrate directional effects in a whole series
of Michelson-Morley-type experiments, conducted initially in collaboration with
Morley. His results correlated with
sidereal, not solar, time, showing that they were sensitive to our motion
through space. He was following up
hints that were present even in the original experiments, which never had been
truly "null". Quite what the
physical mechanism was -- whether purely an aether wind effect, or a length
contraction, or some of each -- remains an open question, but something was
happening that was incompatible with both Einstein's and Lorentz' versions of
relativity theory. There was a real
effect, one that would appear to be precisely the kind of thing that Russell
tells us recent work has failed to reproduce.
How can this
be? I can suggest (based on Miller's
work) several possible explanations:
(a) It is
necessary to repeat experiments at different times of year and different
locations. Has this always been done?
(b) Has the
effect sought been accidentally screened out in the course of attempting to
protect the apparatus from unwanted enviromental influences? (Miller found it necessary to conduct his
main series of experiments in a specially constructed hut with partly canvas
walls.)
(c) Has the
effect been inadvertently "corrected out" by application of accepted
relativity theory?
For more on
Miller and the aether, see an article and correspondence in Physics World
(December 2002, p15; January 2003, p17; March 2003, p19), and material on the
Web such as Miller's own story written in 1940 for his local paper
(http://users.aber.ac.uk/cat/Papers/Miller40.htm) or James DeMeo's
comprehensive study of the whole Miller-Shankland-Einstein controversy
(http://www.orgonelab.org/miller.htm).
DeMeo, incidentally, has now obtained copies of much of Miller's
original data, and can supply this on request.
To return to
Russell's article, was he correct in saying that the Michelson-Morley
experiments "disproved the aether theory"? No, this has never been true.
The text books are wrong. What they
*should* have said was that they ruled out the hypothesis of a *fixed*
aether. For reasons why no other kind
was considered, ask Einstein! A few
messy experimental results are sometimes, despite the best of intentions, no
match for elegant mathematics!
Yours
sincerely
Caroline H
Thompson