Michelson and Morley experiment

The question of the possible existence of a nonzero photon rest mass was raised by Einstein [42], Bass and Schrodinger [43], de Broglie and Vigier [44], and further by Evans and Vigier [5], among others. It includes such crucial points as the relation to the Michelson-Morley experiment, and the so far undetermined value of such a mass and its experimental determination. 

At the beginning of the twentieth century, there were several isolated voices claiming for a revision of the Michelson-Morley interpretation. Hicks [52] performed a theoretical analysis of the Michelson-Morley experiment and concluded that data were consistent with a somewhat larger magnitude of the difference of speeds. More importantly, he noted that the data followed a periodic curve proportional to cos 20, where angle 0 refers to a rotation of the interferometer relative to the presumed direction of orbital velocity. The functional dependence present in the results is of the form to be expected if there existed E. 

The classical Michelson-Morley experiment and calculability of the fine structure constant... 

The crucial poinf here is a possible scale of the effects. The Michelson-Morley experiment and some others are of macroscopic nature and they can check various symmetries on a large scale with respect to atomic and particle effects scale. The latter scale could be studied via a different kind of experiments and it is not necessary that the result be consistent. 

Albert Michelson developed the interferometer about 1880 and conducted the Michelson-Morley experiment in 1887, in which it was found that the speed of light is independent of the motion of the source and the observer, this crucial experiment led Einstein to the theory of relativity. Michelson also used the interferometer to create the predecessor of today s length standard based on the wavelength of light. He received the Nobel Prize in 1907 for precision optical instruments and the spectroscopic and metrological investigations carried out with their aid. ... 

The most important critic of Michelson and Morley s interpetation was, no doubt, Dayton C. Miller. He was a collaborator of Morley in the work that followed the initial experiments. Miller applied some of the corrections suggested by Hicks [52] to the results of Michelson-Morley experiment. Miller reports that, after the corrections, the difference of speeds measured in the original experiment were 8.8 km/s for the noon observations and 8.0 km/s for the evening observations [53, p. 207] clearly, nonnull results. 

In summary, the only direct evidence against the existence of a preferred frame E is the interpretation of Michelson-Morley experiments as being a nullresult. To put it mildly, this evidence is fairly weak. On the contrary, there is mounting evidence for the existence of local anisotropies [49,59,60], which can be interpreted as motion of the earth relative to E. Additionally, a replication of Faraday induction experiments with a rotating permanent magnet yielded a positive outcome [61]. Such results may be interpreted as an indication of the existence of absolute motion, and hence of E. As usual, the final referee will be empirical evidence. Hence, there is a pressing need to carry out new... 

The photon model here refers to a photon at rest in E. The four theories just mentioned are compatible with Eq. (101). Detailed predictions of each theory are different, so that crucial tests may be designed and carried out. For instance, the Michelson-Morley experiment is conventionally interpreted as a demonstration of Einsteinian relativity, but the evidence is not convincing, as discussed in Section II. Another example, to discriminate between relativistic theories (1) and (2) and emission theories (3) and (4), it is necessary to measure with high precision the velocity of photons with energy higher than 100 keV. 

Numerous unsuccessful measurements were made to determine the motion of earth in the ether. These measurements were not able to give results compatible within the framework of classical Newtonian mechanics, even though that the earth has an orbital velocity v0 30,000 m/s (where v0 is velocity of the earth to the ether). In 1887 Michelson and Morley also determined the earth s orbital velocity by their precision interferometer [11], The updated arrangement of Michelson-Morley experiment (M-M experiment) can be seen in Fig. 1. 

Figure 1. An up-to-date arrangement the of Michelson-Morley experiment. Here LASER means the source of light, BS means beamsplitter, Ml and M2 are mirrors on the end of arms, PD is the phase detector (interferometer), and v is the earth s orbital velocity, which is regarded as the inertial motion for short time periods.

Naturally this coincidence does not mean that the geometric optics added to the classical physics could be used for the exact description of the light propagation since the Michelson-Morley experiment refuted its validity forever. It is evident that there are possible new mathematical definitions for c+ and c instead of the ordinary speed addition mle of the classical physics seen in Eqs. (9) and (11). These can be compatible with the experimental results as well. 

There has also been some controversy as to how the experiment affected the development of special relativity. Einstein commented that the experiment had only a negligible effect on the formulation of his theory. Clearly it was not a starting point for him. Yet the experiment has been repeated by others over many years, upholding the original results in every case. Even if special relativity did not spring directly from its results, the Michelson-Morley experiment has convinced many scientists of the accuracy of Einstein s theory and has remained one of the foundations upon which relativity stands. 

Selective gradient experiments are model-dependent. They assume a certain possible effect and look for it. That may be a search for a gradient term, or a differential experiment. Indeed, to isolate a particular effect one should have a model and thus all such gradient terms are model-dependent and the dependence sometimes goes much further than expected naively. Due to the Lorentz invariance somewhat below the famous Michelson-Morley experiment is discussed as an experiment of this kind. 

Here, we consider as an example a possible problem with an interpretation of a classical version of the Michelson-Morley experiment. In the experiment some pieces of bulk matter were rotated. It was expected that when rotating their linear scale would not change and comparing the light propagation in different arms of the interferometer we can judge whether the speed of light is the same in different directions. 

While a natural microscopic picture involves an effective external field, the natural macroscopic description is rather a kind of dilute medium (e.g., for the dark matter) which weakly interacts with light etc. It is not the ether The dilute medium obviously affects the Doppler effect, etc., and produces a signal for the Michelson-Morley experiment. The speed of light would not be a imiversal c. However, for microscopic properties such as a value of mc as the rest energy that would be different. Either they would have no relation to measured velocity of light in the media, or there would be different changes. 

The Michelson-Morley experiment has shown that when an observer in the coordinate system O measures a length in O (and both coordinate systems fly apart v = —u), then he obtains... 

It was proposed independently by Hendrik Lorentz (1853-1928) and George Fitzgerald (1851-1901) in 1892 to account for the null result of the Michelson-Morley experiment. The contraction was given a theoretical background in Einstein s special theory of relativity. In this theory, an object of length lo at rest in one frame of reference will appear, to an observer in another frame moving with relative velocity v with respect to the first, to have length Ua-i /a,... 

Michelson-Morley experiment An experiment, conducted in 1887 by the US physicists Albert Michelson (1852-1931) and Edward Motley (1838-1923), that attempted to measure the velocity of the earth through the ether. Using a modified Michelson interferometer (see illustration) they expected to observe a shift in the interference fringes formed when the instrument was rotated through 90°, showing that the speed of light measured in the direction of the earth s rota-... 

J. Stavek Diffusion action of chemical waves Apeiron 10(2003)183, Diffusion of individual Brownian particles through Young s double-slits Apeiron 11(2004)175 and Diffusion of self-organized Brownian particles in the Michelson-Morley experiment Apeiron 11(2004)373... 

The Michelson and Morley experiment shows the critical importance of intuitive concepts and understanding in the progress of Physics. It is essential that the abstract concepts and intuitive notions of a theory are accurate, precise and correct. A necessary condition is that they correspond exactly to the mathematical formulation of these concepts. In the case of MT during the last century and the beginning of this century, that correspondence was flawed. This example demonstrates the importance of teaching students both the concepts and the mathematics and to make sure that the relationship between the two is fully understood. 

One way to understand special relativity is to see how time dilation and Lorentz contraction of objects parallel to motion can be used to explain the null results of the Michelson-Morley [1] experiment, which was performed to measure the velocity of earth in relation to an assumed ether. The result was that the expected influence of such an ether on the velocity of light was not found. Let us now study this double-pass example, where one arm of a Michelson interferometer was perpendicular to the velocity of the earth s surface, while the other... 

It is well known that Einstein s interpretation for the Michelson-Morley-type experiments was self-consistent in mathematical sense, although he lost the genuine concepts and the traditional a priori and anthropic relations of space and time forever. With this step the science left its childhood or rather, lost its innocence. In this way Einstein created the opportunity for any extravagant interpretations of strange experiments, and so any other physical concepts, for example, the propagation theory, became illusory. 

The Michelson-Morley- and Sagnac-type experiments give only two independent equations—Eqs. (13) and (15)—for three unknown hidden parameters c. c, and cp. In the present case the incompleteness means that there are three unknown parameters for two equations. A third equation is needed in the form of a crucial experiment for the unique solutions. (Of course, this crucial experiment must be independent of the M-M- and Sagnac-type experiments.) In this manner we will be able to develop an authentic nonquantized (complete) theory of light. 

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