What killed the theory of the luminiferous aether?, page 2

reply to post by Cyberbian

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Well said. It is extremely frustrating. Science is run by a priesthood that tolerates no deviation from it's carefully controlled dogma. Theories are often accepted or rejected based on politics, and these days on available funding.

There are so many examples from Cold Fusion, to Rife rays, of world changing science that will never see the light of day.

Originally posted by Buck Division

Originally posted by DevolutionEvolvd
What you might be interested in is whether or not the Michelson-Morley Experiment yielded a null result. That would be a good place to start.....

I am pretty sure you gave the correct answer, Devo.

The Michelson-Morely experiment was an ingenious setup that measured the speed of light reflected off of mirrors, so as to detect the density of an "ethereal wind". It showed that no such wind existed, and opened the door to thinking about the speed of light. This took place around 1880. The original experimental setup is supposedly preserved in the basement of the California Institute of Technology.

Not sure about ZPE -- I've heard about it and I'm going to take a look.

Indeed. Also: they repeated the Michelson-Morley experiment during different parts of the year, because the components of the earth's movement would be different at different parts of the year, due to it's orbit around the sun.

Originally posted by TheBandit795
reply to post by Buck Division

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Did it really yield a null result?

www.orgonelab.org...
allais.maurice.free.fr...

These two researchers, Dayton Miller and Maurice Allais have claimed to have replicated the experiment and have claimed that there is an ether drift.

Yes, it really yielded a null result. It's been run countless times, by numerous people. only a precious few have yielded positive results, and they haven't been especially or notably better run than others. They are simply statistically insignificant outliers.

It quite conclusively shows that light travels at the same velocity in all directions at all times of the year. This would likely mean that either the lumiferous aether is always stationary relative to the earth, or that it doesn't exist.

Sorry maybe shouldn't have bumped this, but I was just reading on this topic.

www.levashov.info...

Since the facts are very crucial here, let us appeal to them. In 1933 the American physicist Dayton C. Miller (1866-1941) published the results of his experiments on the so-called ether drift, carried out during a period of over twenty years. His research was published in the journal "Reviews of Modern Physics". All these experiments confirmed the existence of an ether drift.

He began his experiments in 1902 and finished them in 1926. For these experiments he created an interferometer with a general trajectory for the beam of light of 64 meters. This was the most accurate interferometer in the world at that time and at least three times more sensitive than the interferometer used in the Michelson-Morley’s experiments.

Interferometer data were taken at different times of the day and at different times of the year. Miller performed more than 200,000 observations and made more than 12,000 turns of the interferometer. He periodically brought the interferometer to the top of Wilson’s mountain (6,000 feet above sea level), where, as he had supposed, the speed of ether wind was greater.

And now let us look at what the facts tell us.

On the one hand, we have the Michelson-Morley’s experiments, which altogether were performed for 6 hours, during 4 days, with 36 turns of the interferometer.

And on the other hand, we have experimental data recorded by the interferometer over a period of 24 years, with the device being turned 12,000 times! At the same time, Miller’s interferometer was 3 times more sensitive! These are the facts.

But perhaps Einstein and Co. were unaware of these results, or they didn’t read scientific journals and remained deluded? They perfectly well knew everything. Dayton Miller wrote letters to Einstein. In one of them he reported on his work of 22 years that confirmed the presence of an ether drift. Einstein replied very skeptically and demanded proofs, which were given to him, whereupon there was no answer forthcoming.

We can understand why there was no answer after they had received Miller’s experimental data. However, the most curious thing is that the positive results about the ether drift were registered even in the earlier Michelson-Morley’s experiments, but were "simply" ignored. After Miller’s death in 1941, his work was "simply" forgotten; nobody has ever published it in scientific journals—as if this scientist never existed. But he was one of the greatest American physicists.

I think science is one of the biggest shams there is next to how they run religions.

Originally posted by Johnmike
Sound waves propagate through a medium. They travel through matter. But light doesn't - it can travel through a vacuum. Back in the day, scientists theorized that the universe was composed of an aether through which light traveled, but today, that is generally regarded as debunked. So I'm investigating - what put the nail in the coffin for the luminiferous aether? I figured, why do boring research on my own, when I can make a thrilling thread on ATS?

Let's do this.

Well Newton originally thought it must be grainy, and light was corpusles, also small particles, although up until about Maxwell, light was considered a ray.

For some strange reason the common thought was that it was like jelly. So Michelson and Morely set up an experiment to see if there was drag on light beams as we moved through the ether.

But what they failed to realize was that light has no mass.

And if it has no mass, then it should not have drag.

Now Einstein claimed that light was affected by gravity. And that was shown to be the case by examining light as it moved past the sun during an eclipse. It curved in around the sun due to the strong gravitational field of the sun.

Originally Newton took a bucket, and spun it, and noticed that the liquid was being affected by something which caused it to move up the walls of the bucket. So he ended up calling the ether absolute space.

Einstein, changed that to absolute space-time.

Now Maxwell showed that light did not require a medium, he did not show it didn't use a medium.

Einstein merely said since it acts on everything equally, we do not need to include it in our calculations.

Absolute spacetime is what Einstein called the ether and you can see the effect it has when you rotate a superconducting superfluid. You get vortices in the liquid. Which is really amazing.
ltl.tkk.fi...
And what it shows is that the ether, or space-time or absolute space-time is grainy.

So you see they never claimed there was no ether. Only other people have made that claim.

They merely said it doesn't really matter since we have no way of dealing with it.

So Einstein said that gravity caused space to cure, well space is a something if it is curving.

Nothing is nothing and it cannot curve.

And light travels in space, and if space is is curved around massive bodies then light will travel in a curve.

So this is all conceptually difficult unless you have a model to work with.

So the common model that people like to use is the quantum foam. Or some prefer the sea of virtual particles called the Dirac Sea. If you are a particle physicist then you prefer the Dirac sea, and if you are a wave person, you probably prefer the quantum foam.

But so people can get a little more insight we can pretend a nucleus is a bubble, and waaaayyy down at the smallest level of existence at Plank length, the smallest anything real can be, is a bubble of foam that is Plank length in diameter.

And this foam, is a superconducting superfulid, and light can travel through it without resistance.
Since light is a wave. It acts like a particle because it is a wave packet. A short burst of energy.

But it has no substance. It is only energy and hence has no mass.

If something with mass like that nucleus tries to pass through the foam, it meets with resistance.
Inertia. The faster it tries to plow through it, the more inertia, and the more energy it takes to move through the quantum foam. A large bubble moving through small bubbles.

Around massive bodies, the foam is compressed. And so we can look around a planet and say it has invisible rings, and we can plot a gravitational field according to these pretend rings around the planet. The rings getting closer together as you get closer to the planet.

The curvature of space-time is this ringed effect where around a massive body, the foam is compressed.

So we know a lot about absolute spacetime, by studying virtual particles, which appear and disappear and we also know a lot about it by studying Bose Einstein condensate, and also by studying phonons. But what we know has not been formalized into a comprehensive theory yet.

The most recent leading edge research is studying the border conditions between a superconductor, and a superfluid.

Examine phonons and you will see how energy travels through atoms and even the free space between them.
en.wikipedia.org...
Atoms do not touch each other but energy waves travel through any substance.
There is an ether, it is just called Absolute Space-time according to Einstein and then he said well it can't be absolute, so it is just space-time.
en.wikipedia.org...

You will hear a lot of people say there isn't one, there is one, etc and that is because it is difficult to study and we don't have much knowledge about it. It is easier for people to just flat out say there isn't one, than to try to answer the difficult questions. We know its grainy, we know about Plank Length. Thats about it. The rest is speculation.

Great thread. Very interesting contributions.

Originally posted by Rocketman7
The most recent leading edge research is studying the border conditions between a superconductor, and a superfluid.

I booked marked this thread from February last year, Brown physicist discovers odd, fluctuating magnetic waves, which you might find interesting as it mentions these vortices & fluctuations.

Also, there's Gabriel LaFreniere's site on wave matter – a subject I find totally absorbing given I'm up here near CERN. [He supports the notion of an aether].

Originally posted by chocise
Great thread. Very interesting contributions.

Originally posted by Rocketman7
The most recent leading edge research is studying the border conditions between a superconductor, and a superfluid.

I booked marked this thread from February last year, Brown physicist discovers odd, fluctuating magnetic waves, which you might find interesting as it mentions these vortices & fluctuations.

Also, there's Gabriel LaFreniere's site on wave matter – a subject I find totally absorbing given I'm up here near CERN. [He supports the notion of an aether].

I think eventually this will lead to a theory of quantum gravity, and unite the forces.
It is like the last frontier with people doing little bits here and there and slowly it adds up to something.

But what I find so interesting about a rotating superfluid, is if you take a liitle cup, 1 cm in diameter, and you rotate it once per minute, 1000 little vortices will form in that liquid, equally spaced.

So clearly it is reacting with the very fundamental something that is the fabric of space-time.
And it is in accordance with h/m where h is Pank's constant and m is the mass of one atom.

So by that simple experiment alone, we see that whatever is down there, it is divisible by h.

So with that we can assume that if it is grainy and it must be, the grains might be h diameter.

But by studying Bose Einstein condensate, they managed to flat line some atoms, so they disappeared right into the quantum foam itself. With a Bosenova, where it implodes then explodes but some of the mass disappeared. So then they did it slowly so it wouldn't implode and explode and cooled it right down to almost absolute zero, and basically the condensate just became one with the background, and all that was left, as if you drained a bubble of its air, was that last little bit of momentum, as the skin on a bubble hits the surface with a slap. They predicted it would, measured it, and it matched the predictions. They measured that tiny slap as it flatlined into the quantum foam. Below that are just virtual particles. That can't be detected.
But I find that amazing that what this tells us is that atoms, are not little pieces of rock, because you can make a big one out of a bunch of them, in Einstein Bose Condensate, then drain the energy out of it with lasers, and it will disappear. E=mc2 to be sure. Mass is energy of a sort but it is kinetic energy. Thats where people sometimes get mixed up. They think the energy is like electricity, but its kinetic like motive force.
So the only real part of an atom seems to be its skin, and who knows how that might be unless it too is made of quantum foam or maybe there is some type of eternal liquid, that the foam bubbles are in.

And maybe during the big bang it just ended up with bubbles in it. And maybe at the heat death of the universe, it will once again be just an eternal fluid of unknown description with no bubbles in it.

Its all facinating to ponder really. When so much is known about almost everything else, here is the deep sea, the great unknown ready to be explored.

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