Re: Michelson-Morley & Miller

From: Tom Roberts (tjroberts_at_lucent.com)
Date: 10/12/04 

Date: Tue, 12 Oct 2004 05:22:34 GMT

Kenneth Ellested wrote:
> After reading orgonelab's summary, it actually seems that Miller got very
> positive results.

That depends on what you mean by "positive results".

For instance, the usual scientific standard for "positive results" is
that they be reliable and reproducible. Miller's results have not been
reliably reproduced by any other measurements. And various accounts of
his measurements call into question their reliability (e.g. re-balancing
the interferometer every few minutes, temperature fluctuations).

> I don't think there would be any differences by just rotating the
> interferometer instantly, but the day and seasonal cycles speaks for
> themself. Can this really be a coincidence?

No. But that does NOT mean it is related to any cosmic effect, either.
There's a much more mundane explanation: experimenter's bias.

> Quote:
> "Amazingly, the independent averages for the four epochs provided by Miller
> (Feb.=-10° west of north, April=+40° east, Aug.=+10° east, Sept.=+55° east)
> together yield a mean displacement 23.75° east of north. This is very close
> to the Earth's axial tilt of 23.5°, and can hardly be coincidental."

Look up experimenter's bias. We now know that Miller's apparatus
requires a single-blind protocol (but this was not well known when he
made those measurements).

Miller's supposed "signal" was obtained by averaging several thousands
of observations, which is valid only if they are statistically
independent. But a human observer who knows the sidereal time can
unconsciously apply a non-random round-off, and thus generate such a
"signal". The best intentions of the experimenters cannot prevent this.
Any "signal", like Miller's, that is smaller than the actual resolution
of the apparatus, is suspect.

But it is not appropriate to just cavalierly disregard results like
Miller's, they should generate further investigation. They have -- there
have been many repetitions of this and related experiments, none of
which confirm his results; some of them are thousands to millions of
times more sensitive than his (e.g. Brillet and Hall, Hils and Hall,
Cialdea, Braxmaier et al, Chan et al; see the FAQ for references).

> But what about the speed of light beeing constant to any inertial frame - as
> far as I understand, the lack of an ether made Einstein "invent" his theory
> in the first place - right?

Einstein's personal accounts of his developing SR are unrelated to ether
or the lack thereof -- he mentioned thinking about traveling with a
light wave and noting that in a comoving frame Maxwell's equations
cannot be valid, yet Galilean relativity implies one must be able to
work in such a comoving frame. This purely theoretical contradiction was
his primary motivation, AFAIK.

Tom Roberts tjroberts@lucent.com

Relevant Pages

  • Re: The Speed of Light and the Einstein Legacy: 1905-2005 [Cahill]
    ... In 1933 Miller reported a definitively non-null result for the MMX. ... obtained that 0.08 fringe shift by assuming the errors in the roundoff were ... the "systematic error" is human roundoff ... protocol is required for measurements of this type; ...
    (sci.physics)
  • Re: Michelson-Morley & Miller
    ... > measurements call into question their reliability (e.g. re-balancing the ... But if you read the summary it says that Miller was not ... particular biased to the ether model. ... Relativity, ...
    (sci.physics.relativity)
  • Re: The Speed of Light and the Einstein Legacy: 1905-2005 [Cahill]
    ... [Snip or totally irrelevant material (the issue was the MMX NOT, Miller]) ... questioning the fact that the measurements were less than expected. ... Early aether drift measurements are ...
    (sci.physics)
  • Re: Analysis of repeated measurements across different methods
    ... The reason for 3 human measurements is because the ... reliability, my first reaction would be to perform a 'reliability' ... image sequence and a given method are not independent (that is, ... I've been reading up on ANOVA, and I think maybe a two-factor ANOVA ...
    (sci.stat.consult)
  • Determining reliability
    ... I need to determine the reliability of the precision of the value I ... obtain for the average of a series of measurements. ... reliability on a set of 10 mesurements, however I'm not sure it would ...
    (sci.stat.consult)