I guess I’m slow but I thought that the Michelson-Morley experiment proved that the long sought after and believed Ether of the turn of the century didn’t in fact exist. I came across this>> Dayton Miller's Ether-Drift Experiments article stating that perhaps it in fact is out there filling the otherwise “empty space” of space. I never heard of this Dayton Miller’s Ether-Drift Experiment before and was amassed to see this long believed “fact” to be questioned. Is this really just an early discovery of and misread of “Dark Matter” and “Dark Energy” or is this really a slap in Einstein’s face??
I’m miffed at the thought of it??
Can anyone break this down for me??
I’d suspect that most physicists with an interest in the history of relativity have come across the Miller experiment, at least in passing. Not least because it’s an example dear to the heart of the sociologist of science Harry Collins. That said, few, including myself, have read either Miller’s papers or the Shankland refutation of them.
The deep problem with using positive ether-drift results to attack special relativity is that, historically, the negative results were not terribly important in the first place. There’s nothing in Einstein’s development of SR that explicitly depends on the Michelson-Morley experiment and he never cited it in support during the crucial period where people had to be convinced. The reception of special relativity simply appears to have had nothing to do with ether-drift experiments. All the other evidence in favour was quite sufficient as it was. A lack of interest in exactly why Miller was wrong later on is therefore entirely understandable. He got an odd result doing a hard experiment - happens all the time.
(Meanwhile, the question of quite how the Michelson-Morley experiment came to dominate the later popular and textbook expositions of the subject is a topic I’ve never seen addressed in detail.)
It was Miller’s 1921 result that prompted Einstein to famously comment: Raffiniert ist der Herr Gott, aber boshaft ist er nicht. Which, given the balance of the experimental evidence reported over the years, still seems a fair comment.
[In English: Subtle is the Lord, but malicious He is not.]
Another point to keep in mind is that the author of the web page cited in the OP, Dr. James DeMeo, is a prominent follower of Dr. Wilhelm Reich, originator of the idea of “orgone energy”. The Skeptic’s Dictionary has this to say about Reich and his followers:
While having a “fringe” scientist reference an experiment is not a criticism of the experiment, it does cast a pall over the interpretation given.
As an aside, the Kate Bush song Cloudbusting is about Wilhelm Reich, and opens with the line
Martin Gardner has a chapter about Einstein’s detractors in his book Fads & Fallacies in the Name of Science, in which Miller is mentioned. Miller himself was a trained experimental physicist who fooled himself into thinking he detected some evidence of an ether and somewhat circumspectly questioned the validity of relativity. It was a Georges de Bothezat who popularized Miller’s findings and falsely treated them as definitive proof that Einstein was wrong in his 1936 book Back to Newton.
bonzer: The canonization of the Michelson-Morley experiment was discussed in a series of articles and letters in Physics Today, largely by N. David Mermin:
He was reponding to criticisms of SR in
Collins H.M. and T.J. Pinch. 1993. The Golem: What You Should Know About Science. 2nd Ed. Cambridge [England] ; New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.
I think there were some letters from Collins in PT, too.
You might be interested in Barrow’s The Book of Nothing : Vacuums, Voids, and the Latest Ideas about the Origins of the Universe. I can’t swear for it’s accuracy. I’m just passing on a title.
Also, remember, what is postulated today is not the same “luminiferous ether” of the 1880’s, any more than plate tectonics is “continental drift.”
Space may, in fact, be “full” of something – some weird Machian space-time metric or matrix… But it is not the material that light vibrates in passage, which was what the ether was imagined to be.
Yes, I had forgotten that the Mermin-Collins exchange was largely centred around the history of Michelson-Morley and Miller. But, from - my obviously fallible - memory, neither really got into documenting how the original experiment was originally discussed. I’ve in mind the need for somebody to do a detailed case study along the lines (if not necessarily on the scale) that Macmillan does for Phineas Gage and neuroscience in An Odd Kind of Fame (MIT, 2002); try to both dig out every early reference and survey the way the story found its way into every textbook.
