March 2, 2001
Dr Jim
Ryder
Centre for
Studies in Science and Mathematics Education
Leeds
University
Dear Dr
Ryder
Why are
physics students in such a muddle? (See your article, “Making physics
common sense”, Physics World, March 2001, p15.) The answer is that the foundations of physics went off on the
wrong track at about the beginning of the 20th century, and they are being kept
on that wrong track by insistent misinterpretation of a few key
experiments. Physics could have been common sense but at present
it is not, and we would be better off with just sets of algorithms established
empirically than the illogical theories that masquerade as its twin pillars!
Two
misinterpreted groups of experiment that come particularly to mind are the
Michelson-Morley ones of the turn of the last century, whose supposedly null
results are crucial for Einstein's Special Theory of Relativity, and the Bell
test (“EPR” or “quantum entanglement”) ones of 1972 onwards, crucial for the
current faith in the efficacy of Quantum Theory.
The
Michelson-Morley experiments did rule out the rigid aether that they
were looking for, but at the same time they showed the first indications of the
existence of a different kind of aether.
There were persistent curious patterns in the results, ones that varied
in an interesting manner and attracted some attention right from the start. It was presumed (especially by Einstein)
that these were some kind of artifact, perhaps an effect of temperature
gradient, or magnetic effects – anything so long as it was not the “aether
drift” that would refute the assertion that the speed of light was an absolute
constant. Dayton Miller, an
acknowledged expert in the experimental techniques required, looked into all
these possibilities. He decided to
investigate a rather general model, in which there was aether drift partly due
to the motion of the earth around the sun and partly due to the (then unknown)
motion of the solar system through the galaxy.
This model suggested that the effect should vary in a particular way
according to the time of year. Over the
course of about 20 years, Miller repeated the experiments with variations. By about 1925 he had accumulated a vast
amount of data, revealing patterns that fitted the predictions[1]. They seemed to show a rather modest maximum
speed for the drift (about 10 k/s) but he was not pretending this was the whole
story. There could be a certain amount
of length contraction as per Lorentz and Fitzgerald’s idea (but not
Einstein’s version) and/or there could be other factors. As we now know, the earth is surrounded by
the magnetosphere, and the solar system ends at the heliopause. At these places the aether could be getting
absorbed and its speed relative to us reduced.
Miller met
Einstein on at least one occasion. As
he observed, the latter did not understand his experiments[2]. Miller’s work is now, it appears, unknown to
those in the field. Experimenters such
as Brillet and Hall[3] who have
searched more recently for signs of aether drift do not even refer to his
comprehensive 1933 report. They ignore
a fact that he had discovered: that you cannot expect to detect drift unless
you operate almost in the open air.
Miller’s work has been effectively expunged from the record on the basis
of Einstein’s personal opinion and a paper written in consultation with him after
Miller’s death by Robert Shankland[4]. Nobody, reading both Miller’s paper and
Shankland’s, could fail to realize that Miller knew what he was talking about
while Shankland was merely searching among the discarded data, largely from
calibration runs, to find any scrap of justification for rejecting it. He found variations with temperature, yes,
but Miller had already explained these and avoided all possibility of them
affecting his published results.
Turning to
the Bell tests, I have made a study of these and corresponded with many of the
people working in the area. How can
those unfortunate physics students be expected to think logically when they are
taught that the quantum level allows magic?
You have only to look in this same edition of Physics World. On page 3 we find an article, “Quantum
Loophole Shut”, that ends with the statement: “It appears that it is time for
the local realists to be realistic and admit defeat”!
Never! The article concerns pairs of ions in
optical traps, and as it happens I have already had a look at a report of the
experiment in the electronic archive, http://arXiv.org/abs/quant-ph/0102086. I have already written to the author asking
for more information (see attached). Since writing I think I have arrived at an
hypothesis to explain what has happened: a combination of the fact that the
system lacks rotational invariance (not in itself critical) and the fact that
there are known to be errors in setting the phases which, from the way it is
done, are bound to be the same for both ions, is likely to cause the
kind of bias that can shift the test statistic up over its realist limit.
As regards
the other Bell test experiments, conducted from 1972 to the present, the
experts in the field are well aware of the “loopholes” but apparently they have
lost sight of both logic and the spirit of scientific enquiry. They take as “refuting local realism”
results in which just one of the possible loopholes is blocked – and
there are in fact more than the two mentioned in the Physics World
article. Right from the start the
experimental work has been left in the hands of a very few people, most
theoreticians never delving into the technical details. They have been told that something
inexplicable happens and instead of looking up the facts for themselves have
taken the results at face value.
Relatively few “realist” papers have ever managed to reach the official
journals, and such as there are are almost never cited[5],[6]. Thus the vast majority of papers and popular
writing on the subject relies on second or third-hand material, written by
people who themselves understand neither the experiments nor the way the
loopholes work.
Thus and in
this manner have the cracks in the shaky foundations for too long been papered
over! Perhaps the rot began back in
around 1850, when theoretical physics departments began to separate from
experimental? Perhaps it is more a
matter of the fact that fundamental physics is treated as a career, so that
financial and social risks are attached to any challenge. For myself, it is merely a full-time hobby.
For more on
the Bell tests, see my web site: http://www.aber.ac.uk/~cat. The idea that started my research in this
area gave rise to a model that I named the Chaotic Ball[7],
a very straightforward analogy that explains the principle behind the
best-known loophole. It appears to have
been forgotten that the presence of even one loophole invalidates the Bell
test. The accumulation of the results
of an infinite number of invalid tests means precisely nothing!
Yours
sincerely
Caroline H
Thompson
CC:
Physics
World
New
Scientist
Dr David
Kielpinski
[1] Miller, Dayton C, “The Ether-Drift
Experiments and the Determination of the Absolute Motion of the Earth”, Reviews
of Modern Physics 5, 203-242 (1933)
[2] Miller, Dayton C, “The Ether-Drift
Experiment”, Cleveland Plain Dealer, 10 March, "All Feature Section"
p.1 & 6, (1940), online at http://www.aber.ac.uk/~cat/Papers/Miller40.htm
[3] A. Brillet and J. L.
Hall, “Improved Laser
Test of the Isotropy of Space”, Phys. Rev. Lett. 42, 549 (1979)
[4] Shankland, R S et al, “New Analysis
of the Interferometer Observations of Dayton C Miller”, Reviews of Modern
Physics, 27, 167-178 (1955).
[5] Marshall, T
W, Santos, E and Selleri, F, “Local Realism has not been Refuted by
Atomic-Cascade Experiments”, Phys. Lett. A 98, 5-9 (1983)
6 Thompson, C H, "The Tangled Methods of
Quantum Entanglement Experiments", Accountability in Research, vol. 6, no.
4, pp 311-332 (1999), http://www.aber.ac.uk/~cat/Tangled/tangled.html
[7] Thompson, C
H. "The Chaotic Ball: An Intuitive Analogy for EPR Experiments",
Found. Phys. Lett. 9, 357 (1996), online at http://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/9611037