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| ZP OWER C ORPORATION PAGE OF 352 Z ERO P OINT E NERGY Some scientists say that the ether exists and that the MM experiment didn't measure it. One such scientist is H. Aspden, who claims that the ether is attached to the earth- it is a "localized ether" Consequently the MM experiment didn't measure the ether because it was only designed to measure the linear motion of the earth through space, not rotational motion of the earth through space. Another scientist is E. W. Silvertooth, who claims that any laser interferometer experiment analogous to the MM experiment would give a null result. His idea is that the frequencies of the interfering beams are themselves dependent upon velocity relative to a fixed frame. Therefore the frequency will adjust exactly to cancel any effect due to the motion through the light-reference frame, and a null result is an inevitable consequence. Lorentz and FitzGerald had a related idea that they called the "contraction hypothesis" They postulated that, as a result of the motion of the stationary ether, all bodies are contracted by a factor in the direction of the ether. Therefore an arm of the MM interferometer parallel to the motion of the ether would be shortened by this amount, and no fringe shift would be obtained when the instrument was rotated. (Later the contraction hypothesis was discarded because an effect of the hypothesis was that the velocity of the interferometer should change every twelve hours due to the earth's rotation, and the effect was never found) Other scientists say that an ether doesn't exist, but that abetter explanation must exist for the appearance of light as waves in many situations one example is double-slit experiments. D. Larson promotes the idea that light are particles that travel in a sinusoidal fashion. On this basis, he can easily explain why radiation can have wavelike properties, such as that of polarization, even though it consists of discrete particles. Scott Murray promotes the idea that light are particles that travel in rarefractions and compressions, i.e. concentrations of photons, like sound waves traveling in concentrations of air molecules. The resolutions listed above are only a small number of the many that creative scientists have thought up to explain the properties of light and the null result of the MM experiment. This paper up to this point has been about whether ether exists with relation to light's properties. The question is also important with relation to absolute frames of reference in physics. An ether signifies a fixed frame of reference that scientists can use in their measurements of the universe. Einstein's Special Theory of Relativity says that no such frame of reference exists, i.e. all motion is relative. The finding of an ether would shatter that hypothesis. Therefore, it is doubly important to investigate the ether hypothesis and alternate light theories further. I am not in a position to state a conclusion on whether or not ether exists, but I think that we |