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4. You're an enigma.Originally Posted by JohnQPublic
4. You're an enigma.
Gaillo (10th August 2012)
That is not a dumb question, and it leads to an important point. It is not exactly clear that where space starts spinning.
It comes back to what causes inertia. Newton told us that if something is traveling in a straight line, it will continue to do so unless acted on by another force. Our earthly and near space experiences support that statement. Newton said it because he presumed that space was a giant container, and the ultimate reference frame for everything. He did not know why this was, but he created his physics around that idea. Generally, Newton's cosmology is rejected today.
This is the insight you used to ask your question. What you took for granted is that inertia has an explanation. Unfortunately science does not know what it is (same for gravity).
Let's go back the the rotating earth case. The pendulum is swinging on the north pole (the simplest case). It swings in a plane, and the earth turns beneath it. Why? Well the typical explanation is that it is swinging relative to all the distant masses (stars, galaxies, black holes, etc.). Since they are stationary, then the pendulum stays stationary. Scientists wold say the distant masses form a reference frame for the pendulum. Of course the earth is also a huge mass, and much closer to the pendulum. But obviously, all the other mass out there, though much further away, when summed up act more strongly on the pendulum than the earth's mass. Also, the earth can be seen as rotating in this larger reference frame, too.
Now if the stars have the power to create this reference frame for the pendulum, then if the earth were stationary, and the stars turning, why wouldn't the more powerful stars not drag the pendulum around above the stationary earth? In this case the reference frame is turning, and the earth is stationary relative to it. If the pendulum is dragged, then this is a consequence of what is called Mach's principle (mass out there creates inertia here).
Whether Mach's principle is true or not is not known. Einstein incorporated something like it into general relativity.
So it may not matter exactly where the turning space starts or ends relative to the earth's surface. It is more a question of 'what is inertia'.
It can be looked at from an aether perspective, also, but it gets complicated by such questions as how much if any aether is dragged? Is the aether penetrating the atmosphere? etc. In the case of aether theories, the aether could contain the explanation for some properties (inertia, gravity, etc.).
I'll take that as a compliment!
enigma [ɪˈnɪgmə]n a person, thing, or situation that is mysterious, puzzling, or ambiguous
Event horizons do not occur just due to the number of words placed in a single post.
This is a case where ones ability to regard the post as having any potential whatsoever is taken into account only by those few chosen ones, such as myself... lol
Well, please offer your explanation, then.
Sorry, orbit with no rotation has caused Space dust build up in my one ear over the millennium.
What was said?
As ingenious as Bradley’s answer was to the ellipse formed by Gamma Draconis, so was Airy’s experiment to prove it right or wrong. Accepting that light’s speed was finite, Airy had to figure out some way of determining whether the light from a star was affected by Earth’s supposed motion. Whereas Bradley used only one kind of telescope, Airy had the ingenious idea of using a second telescope filled with water. Since Arago/Fresnel/Fizeau had already shown that light’s speed was slowed by glass or water, Airy assumed
that if a telescope was filled with water then the starlight coming through the water should be slower than it would be in air, and thus bend the starlight outward toward the upper side of the telescope and away from the eyepiece (just as we see light bent when we put a pencil in water). In order to compensate for the outward bending of the starlight, Airy assumed he would have to tilt his water-filled telescope just a little more toward the lower end of the star so that its light would hit his eyepiece directly rather than hitting the side of the telescope.the light from a star was affected by Earth’s supposed motion.
...Although Airy had suspected the outcome prior to the actual experiment, indeed, he soon discovered that he was not required to tilt his water-filled telescope toward the star to any greater degree than his air-filled telescope. These results indicated that Earth wasn’t moving, since if there is no additional adjustment necessary for a water-filled telescope toward the direction of the starlight, it means the starlight is coming into both telescopes at the same angle and speed, that is, directly overhead. If Earth were moving, then a water-filled telescope would have to be titled toward the starlight a little more acutely than an air-filled telescope. This is so for two related
reasons: (1) in the heliocentric model, the Earth is moving sufficiently against the incidence of distant starlight upon it, and thus the water-filled telescope would not be able to catch all of the starlight in the slower medium of water. It would have to be titled slightly ahead of the air-filled telescope to make up for light’s slower speed in water; and (2) since the starlight is coming from outside Earth’s ether environment, then one cannot readily explain Airy’s failure by saying that the denser medium (i.e., water as opposed to air) carried a higher or lower amount of ether, as Fresnel had claimed. Starlight seemed to be unaffected by the ether, or any medium, since Airy proved that its light was coming to Earth at one specified angle and speed.
...Science was in a bind once again. Unless Airy’s experiment could be answered, the world was about to stand still in space, both literally and figuratively.
[Airy published his results in 1871- JQP]
(excerpts from Galileo Was Wrong, pgs. 138-140, footnotes and illustrations not included)
vacuum (10th August 2012)
So now we have a better picture of the circumstances that led to the Michelson-Morley experiments. To save the world from having to “scuttle the Copernican theory,” just a few years after George Airy’s experiment, Albert Michelson invented a somewhat sophisticated piece of equipment to test Airy’s results. The interferometer he assembled was similar to Hoek’s, but it was built a little better and was more accurate, yet it was very sensitive to vibration and heat, and therefore its results could be thrown off a bit. Nevertheless, if the Earth were moving through ether this machine was designed to detect it. The idea was to split a light beam into two beams and send them in perpendicular directions, which beams are then reflected back and recombined on a photographic plate. The distances traveled by the beams are not the same, thus the waves from the two beams will not be in synch, producing a pattern of light and dark fringes after they recombine. These fringes prove that the principle behind the interferometer indeed works, since non-synchronous light waves will produce fringes. Identical to Hoek’s experiment, Michelson’s procedure was to turn, slightly and periodically, the table on which the interferometer rested. The speeds of the two beams
with respect to the ether will thus change, and so will the times taken for the beams to recombine. Because troughs and crests of the light waves would not match up the same as in a non-rotating table, the original fringes would shift in their pattern of bright and dark lines...
The first interferometer trial was in 1881. After Michelson drew up plans for the device and submitted them to a company in Berlin for construction, Alexander Graham Bell, famous for the invention of the telephone, provided the needed funds. Michelson had not met Edward Morley as yet and thus he worked alone. Lo and behold, when Michelson performed the experiment he did not see a significant shifting of fringes, at least not those he was expecting. Using a 600 nanometer wavelength of light, Michelson expected to see fringe shifts (or, as he called them, “displacement of the interference bands”) of at least 0.04 of a fringe width. The 0.04 figure corresponds to an Earth moving at 30 km/sec around the sun. If this was combined with what Michelson believed was the solar system’s apparent movement toward the constellation Hercules, the fringes should have shifted on the order of 0.10 of a fringe width. But Michelson didn’t see any fringe shifting close to either value. He writes:
The interpretation of these results is that there is no displacement of the interference bands. The result of the hypothesis of a stationary ether is thus shown to be incorrect, and the necessary conclusion follows that the hypothesis is erroneous. This conclusion directly contradicts the explanation of aberration which has been hitherto generally accepted, and which presupposes that the Earth moves through the ether, the latter remaining at rest.
...Perhaps Michelson was so astounded at his 1881 results and the interpretation he was forced to admit (i.e., “This conclusion directly contradicts…[the idea] which presupposes that the Earth moves through the ether”) that he had to do the test again just to make sure he could convince himself to believe what his own eyes were showing him, and to reassure every other concerned physicist that this experiment was not a fluke. After attending a series of lectures by William Thomson (aka Lord Kelvin) in 1884, Michelson’s interest in redoing the 1881 interferometer experiment was sparked. Michelson secured financial aid from the Bache Fund of the National Academy of Sciences. This involvement reveals that many influential people were intently anticipating the desired results. Michelson, and his newfound partner Edward Morley, created a new instrument for the occasion, which was much more accurate and not so easily upset by environmental factors...
Michelson did not find what he expected. The experiment was repeated a number of times, but regardless of location, season, elevation, or orientation of instruments Michelson found the results were the same as the 1881 experiment, within a reasonable margin of error. As Michelson records it:
Considering the motion of the Earth in its orbit only, this displacement should be 2D v2/V2 = 2D × 10-8. The distance D was about eleven meters, or 2 × 107 wavelengths of yellow light; hence, the displacement to be expected was 0.4 fringe. The actual displacement was certainly less than the twentieth part of this, and probably less than the fortieth part. But since the displacement is proportional to the square of the velocity, the relative velocity of the Earth and the ether is probably less than one-sixth the Earth’s orbital velocity, and certainly less than one-fourth.
In a letter to Lord Rayleigh (aka John William Strutt), he states it more simply:
...result is decidedly negative. The expected deviation of the interference fringes from the zero should have been 0.40 of a fringe – the maximum displacement was 0.02 and the average much less than 0.01 – and then not in the right place. As displacement is proportional to squares of the relative velocities it follows that if the ether does slip past [the Earth] the relative velocity is less than one sixth of the Earth’s velocity.
...Unfortunately, the scientists interpreting Airy, Hoek and Michelson-Morley simply did not want to consider a motionless Earth as even a possible solution to these astounding experiments. They “knew” the Earth revolved around the sun, and thus they set their heart toward finding other solutions to the problem. As Einstein’s biographer [Clark- JQP] describes it:
In the United States Albert Michelson and Edward Morley had performed an experiment which confronted scientists with an appalling choice. Designed to show the existence of the ether, at that time considered essential, it had yielded a null result, leaving science with the alternatives of tossing aside the key which had helped to explain the phenomena of electricity, magnetism, and light or of deciding that the Earth was not in fact moving at all.
(excerpts from Galileo Was Wrong, pgs. 138-140, footnotes and illustrations not included)
vacuum (10th August 2012)
Attachment 3403
FZ:
Alone in the hissing laboratory of his wishes, Mr. Pugh minces among bad vats and jeroboams, spinneys of murdering herbs, and prepares to compound for Mrs. Pugh a venomous porridge hitherto unknown to toxicologists which will scald and viper through her 'til her ears fall off like figs, her toes grow big and black as balloons, and steam comes screaming out of her navel.
...A November 10, 1894 letter from Lorentz to Fitzgerald shows that the Michelson-Morley experiment was driving them to these positions:
My dear Sir, in his “Aberration Problems” Prof. Oliver Lodge mentioned a hypothesis which you have imagined in order to account for the negative result of Mr. Michelson’s experiment.
“Imagination,” indeed. Fitzgerald revealed this imaginative “hypothesis” to Oliver Lodge in early 1892 on a visit to Liverpool. He told him the following:
Well, the only way out of it that I can see is that the equality of paths must be inaccurate; the block of stone must be distorted, put out of shape by its motion…the stone would have to shorten in the direction of motion and swell out in the other two directions.
But as Clark [Einstein's biographer- JQP] shows, initially it was not well received:
For some years this explanation appeared to be little more than a plausible trick. ‘I have been rather laughed at for my view over here,’ Fitzgerald wrote to Lorentz from Dublin in 1894.
But when Fitzgerald learned of Lorentz’s support for the hypothesis, he suddenly changed his tune and wrote these words:
My dear Sir, I have been preaching and lecturing on the doctrine that Michelson’s experiment proves, and is one of the only ways of proving, that the length of a body depends on how it is moving through the ether… Now that I hear you as an advocate and authority I shall begin to jeer at others for holding any other view.
Obviously, Fitzgerald was “laughed at” because his solution seemed all too convenient...
...All that was needed now was to package Fitzgerald’s idea in scientific language and a mathematical formula since this would give it an air of prestige and intelligence. This task was left to Henrick Lorentz. As he puts it:
The first example of this kind is Michelson’s well-known interference experiment, the negative result of which has led Fitzgerald and myself to the conclusion that the dimensions of solid bodies are slightly altered by their motion through the ether.
[And thus, the Fitzgerald-Lorentz contraction is born. The door is now open for Albert Einstein.]
(excerpts from Galileo Was Wrong, pgs. 147-151, footnotes and illustrations not included)
vacuum (10th August 2012)
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