Re: Michelson-Morley: Much ado about nil


cafeinst@xxxxxxx wrote:
Has anyone read this paper?

http://www.ptep-online.com/index_files/2006/PP-06-10.PDF

It claims that the Michelson-Morley experiment doesn't really prove
that there is no absolute continuum. Any comments about it? It seems to
me to be very surprising. His argument is not very complicated; I'd
like to hear the opinions of the experts on this.

Thank you,
Craig

I think that many of the posters are not thinking carefully about what
the author of the paper is saying. He should be given the benefit of
doubt and people should not take what he is saying out of context like
I think people are doing. Let me try to explain:

The interpretation of the Michelsen-Morley experiment (MME) that
everyone learns in high school assumes that light is a particle -
Suppose that the speed of light is c when there is no aether wind. Then
if the aether wind has velocity v, then the MME should confirm that the
time that the light takes to go from the emitter to the mirror and back
to the emitter is 2d/c when there is no aether wind and d/(c-v)+d/(c+v)
when there is an aether wind. Because the MME does not confirm this,
the standard conclusion is that there is no aether wind.

However, suppose that light is a wave on a substance called aether
which has a wave-structure. Suppose that a light wave is moving in this
aether with speed c. Now suppose that a light wave is moving in this
aether from the perspective of someone moving with velocity -v with
respect to the aether. Then from this person's perspective, the aether
wind is moving with velocity v. But the light wave must still travel
with speed c from the perspective of this person - the aether wind
should have no effect on the velocity of the light wave, *because it
too has a wave-structure*.

It's like a person splashing waves in a regular swimming pool and that
same person splashing in a wave-generating pool (the type you find at
amusement parks). The waves which the person splashes have the same
velocity in each pool, even though the form of the waves in each pool
looks different.

I'll have to think about this more. This appears to me at this time to
be a very important paper. Comments?

Craig

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