Re: Absolute speed through the ether?

Jack Crenshaw wrote:

Last night I was watching a show -- originally from BBC -- on Discovery
Channel, which talked about the evolution of the notion of the Big Bang.
Near the end was a discussion of the COBE results.

The thing that got my attention was the statement by one of the
researchers, that the Cosmic Background Radiation (CBR) was not uniform,
but stronger in one direction than the other. This, he said, was "not
really a difference in the CBR, but due to the motion of the earth
relative to the rest of the universe."

A bit later, they showed a graphic of the radiation, and sure enough,
there's a "hole" in one side, and a brighter spot in the opposite
direction. This researcher repeated the "speed of the earth relative to
the universe" assertion, and said that they could take out the asymmetry
by compensating for the known velocity.

I'm sitting there going "Huh?" I thought that the whole point of the
Michelson-Morley experiment, and Einstein's special theory that came out
of it, was that it's not possible to measure our speed through the
"ether."

Now, it seems, we can do exactly that.

No.

http://arXiv.org/abs/0706.2031
Physics Today 57(7) 40 (2004)
http://physicstoday.org/vol-57/iss-7/p40.shtml
<http://cfa-www.harvard.edu/Walsworth/pdf/PT_Romalis0704.pdf>
No aether

http://fsweb.berry.edu/academic/mans/clane/
http://physicsweb.org/articles/world/17/3/7
<http://relativity.livingreviews.org/Articles/lrr-2005-5/index.html>
http://arxiv.org/abs/0801.0287
No Lorentz violation

What does "speed of the earth, relative to the universe" really mean?
Does it mean relative to the average motion of all the parts of the
universe, or relative to the site of the original singularity? Or
perhaps relative to one certain galaxy out of all others?

The thought did occur to me that they're talking about the ACCELERATION
of the earth, due to its orbiting the sun. That would make a modicum of
sense, but that's not what they SAID.

What am I missing here?

Jack

Every direction, all 4(pi) steradians, exactly point at an equidistant
Big Bang. In which direction are you "moving"? If space is not
homogeneous and isotropic then linear and angular momenta,
respectively, are not conserved through Noether's theorem.

But they are.

--
Uncle Al
http://www.mazepath.com/uncleal/
(Toxic URL! Unsafe for children and most mammals)
http://www.mazepath.com/uncleal/lajos.htm#a2
.

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