From: c.h.thompson
To: Physics World physics.world@iop.org
Cc: Robert Crease; James DeMeo
Subject: Dayton Miller's aether drift experiments
Date: 30 December 2002 19:24
The Editor
Physics World
December 30, 2002
Dear Sir
Was the physics community right to reject Dayton Miller's 1925 evidence? (Robert Crease, December 2002, p15 and letters, January 2003, p17.) Indeed, can it be said that they did?
Crease reports that the APS members did not interpret it as a refutation of Special Relativity, and maybe that's true, but they did not reject his facts. My interpretation of the proceedings of a conference held in Pasadena in 1927 (Astrophysical Journal 68, 341 (1928)) was that they (including Michelson) recognised that Miller had found an interesting pattern that ought to be followed up. Einstein himself, though not present at the meeting, had written: "If Dr Miller's observations were confirmed, the Theory of Relativity would be at fault. Experience is the ultimate judge" (Science Review, 1925), so the failure to reject Relativity was only logical, one would have thought, if the experimental findings themselves were disputed.
Popular books support Crease's statement that "hundreds of other experiments agreed wtih Michelson and Morley's work". How many report that Michelson and Morley's experiments did not show a "null" result, merely one that conflicted with the particular hypothesis they had set out to test, namely that of a stationary aether? In his letter, Fraser Smith tells us that "Dayton Miller's experiment was not reproducible", but has anyone ever attempted to reproduce it exactly? Those experiments that I have studied seem to have been designed in ignorance of important details, including the fact that Miller's results seemed to show that the aether wind was much reduced by screening. This apart, close inspection reveals that they have tested once again the original static aether hypothesis, which had already been ruled out, and the reports gloss over the small systematic variations that they cannot explain.
I fear that Crease is not being objective when he states that it is "the ideologues -- those with antiscientific axes to grind -- who were insisting that the theory should be tossed out because of a falsification". For one thing, there have always been very good scientific reasons for simply assuming the existence of an aether, recognising that no experiment is likely to be able to rule out a fluid one with unknown properties. For another, as Crease says, by the time Miller's results became public (they had been in the air ever since the first aether drift experiments in 1887) "relativity was already tightly woven into contemporary science". No, there is reason to believe that ideologues abound among the followers of relativity at least as much as among its opponents! Crease's implication that it is "unscientific" to toss out relativity reflects present-day prejudice in favour of Einstein, but I can name a few respected scientists who never saw the need for his theories!
For more, see my pages on "Forgotten
History". James DeMeo has recently done some comprehensive research into Miller's work and published the results at
http://www.orgonelab.org/miller.htm . Even more recently, he has managed to unearth much of the original data, which he had feared had been burned. It had been handed by Miller to Robert Shankland shortly before his death in 1941. He was not to know that Shankland was to turn against him, writing (in collaboration with Einstein) the damning 1955 report that almost erased his work from the record.
Yours sincerely
Caroline H Thompson
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