Re: Aether; was Re: Can somebody please help me with understanding this Michelson Morley setup?

dlzc wrote:
Dear The TimeLord:

On May 7, 9:47 am, The TimeLord <mathnphysics-...@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
N:dlzc D:aol T:com (dlzc) wrote:

Dear Peter Kobal:
"Peter Kobal" <PKO...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:f1n27q$fa8$1@xxxxxxxxxxx
I found this on Wikipedia,
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/94/Michelson-morley.png
and it describes the Michelson Morley experimental
setup.
...
HOW could they
ever expect a fringe shift?
Mitchell Jones response is a good one.
Was there only one kind of possible aether at the
time of the experiment?
There were originally three types of aether proposed:
one at rest to with respect to the observer, one at
rest with respect to emitter and one at rest with
respect to distant stars. The Michelson-Morley
experiment showed that these are experimentally
the same.

I was thinking more along the lines of "rigid" vs. dragged, rather
than rigid-with-unknown-relative-velocity. A dragged aether would be
a rest wrt the source *and* the receiver, and have entirely different
velocities in between.

I wouldn't know about that. As you can tell, I'm not a believer in
aether. I find SR and classical EM more useful when doing
calculations. I never have any problem that screams that I have to use
aether to solve it. [smile]


Given all the other self-contradictions in the aether
theory, the only way that the facts are possible, is if
the aether doesn't exist.

In hindsight, if you look at Maxwell's equations, you
can see that the aether idea was a stupid one even
without Relativity. Clearly from those equations, the
E-field is carried by the B-field and vice versa.
Hence no need for the aether: the light is its own
medium. It's a wonder why anyone this day and age
would be naive enough to still adhere to something
so stupid.

The Lorentz aether still survives to this day, because only Occam can

Not among physicists. No version of aether is ever taught (as far as I
know). It's not needed, given the simplicity of other ideas.

"kill" it. But Maxwell started with an aether, and its requirement

Not true. The aether was suggested in Germany in the late 19th century
in complete contradiction to Maxwell's equations, which predate the
aether idea.

simply falls out along the way. Some people still find this model
necessary for their thought processes, and some (of course) just like
to argue. ;>)

[smile] I'm not trying to argue. It's just that I see no use for using
more complicated ideas. It's kind of like the argument that you could
use a geocentric solar system to calculate orbital trajectories and
get the right results by simply picking the right transformation rules
between it and the heliocentric solar system. It turns out that that
is true (try it using Mathematica or such). However would you really
want to do the endless calculations that a geocentric solar system
requires? A heliocentric system is much, much simpler. In a similar
way, simply accepting the obvious suggested by Maxwell's equations
and/or SR is simpler than inventing something as self-contradictory as
the aether. Anyway ... just my opinion.

--
// The TimeLord says:
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