Proving that there IS an Ether !?!

[Kedas]

Anyone know what Maurizio Consoli is going to do that is different than the many other attempts to prove that the ether did (not) exist?

 

http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg18624930.900&feedId=space_rss091'>http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg18624930.900&feedId=space_rss091

or go to http://www.newscientist.com/ en enter ether in the search box.

the title of the article is: Catching the cosmic wind

[ed84c]

The link isnt working. Maybe thats why youve had few replies?

 

Personally i dont quite see why there should be an ether, it sounds like one of those sun revolves around the earth theories to me.

[Kedas]

The link works for me, anyway:

this is what's up there:

We killed off the ether a hundred years ago. So why is the search back on, asks Marcus Chown

 

TWO hundred thousand dollars seems a small price to pay. If the most famous null result in science was right, at least we'll finally be sure. And if it was wrong, then Einstein is no longer king of the universe. No wonder Maurizio Consoli is keen to get started. This experiment could be dynamite.

 

Consoli, of the Italian National Institute of Nuclear Physics in Catania, Sicily, has found a loophole in the 19th-century experiment that defined our modern view of the universe. The experiment established that light always travels through space at the same speed, whatever direction it is heading in and whatever the motion of its source: there is no way to put the wind in light's sails.

 

Einstein used this foundation to build his special theory of relativity, but it seems his confidence may have been premature. Consoli's paper, published in Physics Letters A (vol 333, p 355), ...

 

To continue reading this article, subscribe to New Scientist.

 

Some more info here:

http://phorum.internalspace.co.uk/read.php?2,396,396

[ed84c]

We need the rest of the article really to pass judgement, but in my view thats money down the drain.

[Kedas]

some PDF's of Maurizio Consoli http://arxiv.org/find/physics/1/au:+Consoli_M/0/1/0/all/0/1

[Newtonian]

We need the rest of the article really to pass judgement, but in my view thats money down the drain.

Hmmm...£250,000 to finally prove one way or the other is relatively cheap one thinks.

[muhali3]

I read that article in New Scientist. They said he was going to put light beams facing in different directions and try to measure any difference in speed, which would be supposedly be due to the ether. I don't know of any other experiments to test it's existence.

[Fortuna]

hmmm. That link doesn;t work for me either.

 

In any case, I assume that we are talking about the famous Michelson-Morely experiment. One very vocal opponent of the classic interpretation of MM is canadian physicist Paul Marmet. Marmet claims that the null result does not in fact disprove the existence of a lumineferous ether.Here is a link to Marmet's argument. . I have also seen some assertions by some of the anti-SR folks that MM actually did not achieve a null result.

 

Years ago on the old deja vu forums I used to argue passionately against the anti-SR people. But, to be honest, I never seemed to get anywhere with them, and it seemed they always had alternate explanations for verified time dialation phenomena (some good, but most of them were quackery). I ultimately just gave up. It seemed to me that because they wanted so badly for that absolute and universal frame of reference to exist that no argument no matter how logical or proven was going to sway them. I presented to them the extension of half life in cyclotrons, the cosmic ray/muon phenomena, none of which convinced them or swayed them in the least.

 

I actually saw one guy who posted a "proof" that absolute motion could be detected using a 3 FoR system. I tried to corner him by taking his system and by arbitarily adding the an arbitrary velocity to all 3 FoR's proved that using his system it was undetectable. He told me that I was only "cleverly manipulting the math" and that just because I was able to do that it had no bearing on reality

 

For that particular group, it was a dogmatic belief. Given the answer above,

I though it useless to continue to argue with these people. I gave up, and they claimed victory. Other people like myself did the same thing, and ultimately they like me, just gave up.

 

 

What is revealing to me about most of the Deja people is that none of them were trained physicsts, and almost all of them admitted that they didn't know calculus or advanced mathematics. I and other then asked them over and over again how they thought themselves qualified to even discuss SR, much less disprove it. We got the usual reponses that we had been "brainwashed by the universities" and other such arguments. They really were never going to accept the relativity of time.

 

Anyway, it should be interesting to see if these guys come up with a null result from their version of the MM experiment.

 

I am tempted to reproduce a post or 2 here from another forum wher the same anti-SR argument has been taking place for years. I feel sorry for the people of that forum, because the anti-SR crowd perverts any thread about SR into a battlefield.

 

I can only hope that it doesn;t happen (or hasn;t happenned) here.

[swansont]

Years ago on the old deja vu forums I used to argue passionately against the anti-SR people. But' date=' to be honest, I never seemed to get anywhere with them, and it seemed they always had alternate explanations for verified time dialation phenomena (some good, but most of them were quackery). I ultimately just gave up. It seemed to me that because they wanted so badly for that absolute and universal frame of reference to exist that no argument no matter how logical or proven was going to sway them. I presented to them the extension of half life in cyclotrons, the cosmic ray/muon phenomena, none of which convinced them or swayed them in the least.

[/quote']

 

Have you met Johnny5 here yet? Syntax 252, too.