Zero Point Energy doc
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| ZP OWER C ORPORATION PAGE OF 352 Z ERO P OINT E NERGY So we have a combination of properties that is very hard to visualize. The ether must bean extremely tenuous gas and possess a rigidity greater than that of steel. About a dozen experiments have tested the existence of an ether. The most famous is the Michelson- Morley (MM) experiment. I will focus on that one. After I describe the experiment, I will state the contradictory results and how some scientists have resolved the contradictions. Michelson and Morley's experiment was designed to measure the motion of the earth through the ether. We are fixed on the earth, so the ether should move relative to us. The velocity of light (c) traveling through this either would change for angles that ranged from light was traveling in the same direction as the ether (c+v) to light traveling in the reverse direction of the ether (c-v). The key instrument in their experiment was an interferometer which allows one to see light interference fringes. The role of the interferometer was to detect whether abeam of light, split into paths at right angles to each other and then recombined, has a difference in velocities over the two paths. The interferometer was set with one path parallel to the motion of the earth in its orbit, and then rotated to put the other path parallel to the motion of the earth. The detailed setup for the MM experiment follows. Light from a source L is split into two beams by a half silvered mirror (e.g. it's coated with enough silver to reflect half the light and allow the remaining half to be transmitted) at P. The beams are reflected at two mirrors Sand S respectively and return through the half-silvered mirror to the telescope at the other end, where Michelson and Morley noted the number of interference fringes n. To calculate n they first calculated a time for the light to traverse the paths PS1P and PS2P. Then they calculated the difference in optical path defined as D=c(t1- t. Michelson and Morley rotated the experimental setup 90 degrees and repeated the calculations. They calculated anew optical path D. If ether exists then the interference fringes should shift by n fringes where n is defined by (D- D)/l, and l is the wavelength of the light source. The result of the experiment was that they found no shifts in the interference fringes. The accuracy of their result was 10 km/sec. E.g., although the earth's orbital speed is 30 km/sec and the light's speed of 300,000 km/sec, the velocity or the earth relative to any ether frame must be less than 10 km/sec. The experimental result introduces a conflict. Light waves, whatever their form, could not be mechanical waves in a physical medium. And if they were not waves in a physical medium, how could they be said to be waves at all Two resolutions of the conflict exist. Either an ether exists, and the MM experiment didn't measure it or an ether doesn't exist, and light is not a wave. |