Re: Michelson Morley experiment with sound waves
- From: PD <TheDraperFamily@xxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Tue, 17 Jul 2007 16:51:10 -0000
On Jul 16, 11:43 am, cafei...@xxxxxxx wrote:
On Jul 16, 1:20 am, PD <TheDraperFam...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Jul 15, 10:59 pm, cafei...@xxxxxxx wrote:
If I were to set up the Michelson Morley experiment with sound waves
instead of light, I would probably also get the null result on a calm
day, as there is no reason for sound to travel faster in one direction
than another direction. Does this mean that the air is not responsible
for carrying the sound waves, i.e., sound waves don't require a medium
of transmission? Am I missing something here?
Craig
Yes, you are missing something. Remember the MM apparatus was tied to
the Earth, and because of the Earth's rotation and its motion around
the sun, just waiting a bit will guarantee a "wind" with respect to
the ether. That is, if the experiment happened to be run once during a
time when that point of the Earth coincidentally was at rest relative
to the ether, then simply waiting 12 hours (or 3 months) will
guarantee that it isn't at rest relative to the ether for the
subsequent run. What people often miss about the MM experiment is that
it was repeated over those time intervals on purpose, to let the
Earth's motion guarantee that if there was some ether, the Earth *had*
to be moving through it for at least one of the data runs.
To use your analogy, do the sonar analog of the MM experiment on a
circus carousel. If there is no wind at one point on the carousel's
path, then just wait 15 seconds and repeat the experiment, because
there *has* to be a wind on the other side.
PD
My point is what if the aether moves with the earth's atmosphere just
as the air moves with the earth's atmosphere? Then the traditional
conclusion from the Michelson Morley experiment, that there is no
aether or aether is irrelevant, would not be a valid conclusion.
There's then two possibilities:
1. The ether gets locally "dragged" with the atmosphere, but there is
a place well outside the atmosphere where the ether doesn't get
dragged, and there is some sort of transition layer between the two
regions. In this case, there are searchable transition effects that
would impact light traversing both regions -- notably starlight. Such
effects have been looked for and not found. (In fact, in part they
were looked for and not found BEFORE the MM experiment, and this led M
& M to believe that their experiment should be sensitive to the
relative motion in the ether because they already had evidence that it
wasn't being dragged by the atmosphere.)
2. The ether just *happens* to be turning everywhere, not just
locally, in such a way that the Earth is always at rest in the ether.
Since that would imply a torsion in the ether with the center just
happening to lie in the Sun and just happening to be at the same rate
as the Earth's orbit, that seems to be highly unlikely.
PD
.
- References:
- Michelson Morley experiment with sound waves
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