Re: H. P. Lovecraft on the existence of aether

Doug Renner ( dougr@adeptit.com )
Fri, 2 Apr 1999 05:47:11 -0600 (EST)

> "Recent lectures of interest have been on Plato's Republick, modern art,
> Gilbert Stuart, Rhode-Island silversmiths, archaick Greek art, Philosophy and
> Poetry, early classical sculpture, Mayan ruins, and the Michelson-Morley
> experiment. The last-named, deliver'd at the college Monday night, was by Prof.
> Dayton C. Miller, former colleague of Morley and present continuer of the
> experiment. He furnish'd startlingly convincing proof that the real results of
> the experiment do NOT shew that total absence of effect of the observer's motion
> on the speed of light which forms the underlying assumption of the Einstein
> theory.

I've always wondered if the M-M experiment was doomed to failure, since it
was performed within the Earth's magnetic field. In terms of the ether,
the Earth's magnetic field may be like a big bubble pushing its way
through the drifting flux, while the M-M interferometer experiment was
performed inside this bubble, so it would of course detect little if any
drift.

I speculate that the Michelson-Morley experiment might be analogous to
using an anemometer indoors, then concluding there is no such thing as
wind.

> Instead, there is merely a lack of the full difference which the
> observer's motion ought (according to the old theory of time and space) to make.
> Prof. Miller very pertinently asks whether Einstein -- and Eddington and Jeans
> and all the rest -- ought to assume (and base a whole theory of cosmick entity
> on that assumption) that the Michelson-Morley experiment always gives zero
> (reckoning any difference from that as error), when in truth it always gives a
> fairly constant difference from zero; in the direction that the earth's motion

My idea is to perform the interferometer experiment within an EXPANDING or
COLLAPSING magnetic field.

Does anyone know if this has ever been done?

Doug Renner