Aucbvax.5836 fa.space utcsrgv!utzoo!decvax!ucbvax!space Mon Jan 18 14:39:52 1982 SPACE Digest V2 #80 >From OTA@S1-A Fri Jan 15 03:42:03 1982 SPACE Digest Volume 2 : Issue 80 Today's Topics: Question on Michelson-Morley experiment Re: Question on Michelson-Morley experiment Question on Michelson-Morley experiment Question on Michelson-Morley experiment Analog 'hoaxes' Harry Stine Harry Stein and Physics The 8 KPH Light Drift ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: 14 January 1982 06:31-EST From: Jerry E. Pournelle Subject: Question on Michelson-Morley experiment To: KLH at MIT-AI cc: SPACE at MIT-MC, SF-LOVERS at MIT-AI Harry gets carried away sometimes. He also told of the chap who did the Michaelson Morley experiment hudreds of times and got all kinds of relative motion. I asked Bob Forward about that, and Bob said, "Yep, he did the same experiment with the same crummy equipment and kept getting the same erroneous results..." I have often thought of doing an SF story in which they go to the Moon and someone does the M-M experiment and gets the relative velocity of Moon around Earth... ------------------------------ Date: 14 Jan 1982 10:40:35-EST From: csin!cjh at CCA-UNIX To: klh at mit-ai Subject: Re: Question on Michelson-Morley experiment Cc: space-enthusiasts at mit-mc I will leave the question of references, accuracy, etc. to those who have more immediate access to physics libraries. (Though I notice you don't mention any footnote going with this claim.) However, it should be noted that G. Harry Stine is an enthusiast, liable like most such (especially hard-engineering types) to go overboard when talking outside his specialty. (Stine's specialty is rockets; he was one of the honchos at White Sands and helped push a nationwide model rocketry club.) ------------------------------ Date: 14 January 1982 11:41-EST From: Robert Elton Maas Subject: Question on Michelson-Morley experiment To: KLH at MIT-AI cc: SPACE at MIT-MC, SF-LOVERS at MIT-AI Analog has a long history of making absolutely matter of fact statements which are totally false, to support their latest big hoax. -- Remember the "Dean Drive"? Campbell, then editor, made a flat statement in a reply to a letter to the editor that a Dean Drive hanging from the ceiling on a rope and aimed sideways will rise up at an angle, thus refuting the claim that all thrust was really just nonlinear vibrational effects on the bathroom scale they had been using. I actually started believing in the Dean Drive after that letter-reply, for a few years, sigh. -- Remember the crystal that dissolved about 1 second before it struck water, so they hooked up a chain of them with each dissolving of a crystal causing water to drop on the next? They went pretty matter-of-fact on that, although I was smart enough not to believe them. -- I don't believe this stuff about Michaelson-Morley experiment showing a positive result. More likely the velocity reported was the experimental error, the claim being that an upper bound on our motion thru the "ether" was found, and Analog distorted the truth to make their hoax. (If experimental error is 8, and you measure 0, then it's possible the correct value is anywhere from -8 to +8, you can't say it's zero for sure, but Analog has no right to say it isn't zero either. Probably the measured value was not zero, but close enough to zero to be within the range of experimental error. The best (simplest) conclusion to make is that it's probably exactly zero but that more accurate equipment will be needed to either bracket it closer to zero or actually bracket it away from zero.) Now if Science had made the same claim, I'd be more willing to look into the matter instead of just dismissing it. ------------------------------ Date: 14 January 1982 13:27-EST From: John G. Aspinall Subject: Question on Michelson-Morley experiment To: KLH at MIT-AI cc: SPACE at MIT-MC, SF-LOVERS at MIT-AI The Michelson-Morely experiment has been repeated many times. A summary of a number of these experiments appeared in a review article by Shankland et al. [1] in 1955. The best test I could find a reference to, is one using lasers in 1964 [2]. (I found pointers to both these references in "Special Relativity", by French.) In none of these experiments, was there any detected fringe shift that could be ascribed to ether motion. Later experiments put successively lower bounds on any possible motion. In the laser experiment, "... No change in beat frequency ... was detectable within the accuracy of the measurement (about +/- 3kHz). This was less than 1/1000 of the change that one would calculate from an ether-wind hypothesis...." (Quote from French.) Now fringe shift (or beat frequency shift - same thing) is proportional to the square of the velocity difference, so this means that any motion is down by a factor of more than 30 from the ether-wind hypothesis. This is certainly not the detected motion that Stine claims. I haven't read the Stine column, and I would be interested to hear if the letters section in following months had any complaints about this in it, but I will inject one personal note here. This is the sort of thing that gives SF a very bad name - if we (the collective SF community, editors especially) let this sort of thing go unchallenged, then we deserve the reputation of not being able to distinguish fact from fiction. SF might as well be all fantasy. Any claims to being intelligent speculation about "what might happen" go out the window, in the eyes of many. Agreed, there is a line to be drawn between stifling creative thought, and "print everything as fact", but you don't overcome "math anxiety" by telling the student that all answers are right. Likewise you don't encourage intelligent speculation about OUR world, by ignoring what we know already. [1] Shankland et al., Rev. Mod. Phys., 27, 167, (1955). [2] Jaseja et al., Phys. Rev. 133, A1221, (1964). John Aspinall. ------------------------------ Date: 14 Jan 1982 1108-PST From: Tom Wadlow Subject: Analog 'hoaxes' To: rem at MIT-MC CC: space at MIT-MC, sf-lovers at MIT-MC I think Robert has his facts a little confused about Analog participation in gross deception. - The Dean Drive has never been tested (or the tests were not reported in Analog) by hanging it pendulum-fashion. Analog carried several articles saying that this is the proper way to test alleged reactionless drives (I agree). Dean never let his drive system get into the hands of people who could test it scientifically. Analog NEVER said it was a real reactionless drive, only that it MIGHT be one and somebody should try and find out. Several people did try (Stine among them) but nobody ever got a Dean Drive to play with and thus nobody knows. - Thiotimoline (the crystal that dissolved before the water hit it) was the subject of a series of fiction stories by (I believe) Isaac Asimov. You are the first person I have heard from to believe they were NOT intended as fiction. As for the differences in the Michelson-Morley experimental data, I am inclined to treat them as experimental error. In any event, I recall reading that article and being somewhat annoyed that Stine did not provide references to back up his claim. Flaming on a technical subject is fine as it stimulates thought, but if you can't back it up you lose credibility as far as I am concerned. ------------------------------ Date: 14 Jan 1982 (Thursday) 1642-EST From: DYER at NBS-10 Subject: Harry Stine To: klh at MIT-AI cc: space at MIT-AI Isn't he the person who also claimed (in the pages of Analog) to have discovered, or at least found someone who had discovered, a reactionless drive, presumably based on mechanical (e.g. gears and pulleys and electric motors) principles? I think that Harry (?) Stine is a person given to the lost causes of physics (FTL, antigravity and something-for-nothing.) Last I heard, which was a long time ago, he was having the predictable trouble in convincing people he had a /real/ (now the name comes back) 'Dean Drive,' which somehow produced thrust without an equal and opposite reaction. Some people will do anything for a living.... -Landon- ------------------------------ Date: 14 Jan 1982 1712-PST From: Alan R. Katz Subject: Harry Stein and Physics To: klh at MIT-AI, space at MIT-MC, sf-lovers at MIT-AI cc: katz at USC-ISIF Please dont believe what Harry Stein says about more abstract physics. There is an excellent rebuttal to this particular article in an issue of analog a few months later written by some graduate student. In particular, the feeling you get from the article that physicists dont really know as much as they pretend to, that there really may be an ether, and that there is lots wrong with relativity is pretty much hogwash. Stein also writes about the Dean drive, an new reactionless drive which is really bizzare and so on. His book, "The Third Industrial Revolution" is quite good, and he has written much about space industrialization which is quite good, however, after the things he writes about physics, or about the dean drive, I wonder how correct his other information is. Alan ------------------------------ Date: 14 January 1982 20:43 est From: Tavares.WFSO at MIT-Multics Subject: The 8 KPH Light Drift To: Space-Enthusiasts at MIT-MC In-Reply-To: Message of 14 January 1982 06:02 est from Ted Anderson Intriguing, indeed! After reading this trans, I called Harry Stine to ask where he got the info. He says he found it in "The Act of Creation" by Arthur Kessler. He also sent for a copy of a paper that was given to the American Physical Society by a Doctor Miller ("he didn't want to give it to me-- the APS doesn't like to admit it exists") wherein it was also described. He says he's also seen it in several physics books, where they "attempted to explain it away-- which is like arguing about how many devils fit on the head of a pin. It's a hole, it bothers me, but it's there and it's been checked, and proven, and everything." According to Harry, the motion is in the "right direction" to the motion of any expected ether. A "viscous" ether, perhaps? (Harry, who lives in Phoenix, would love access to this mailing list in general, but doesn't have any leads. Can anybody help?) ------------------------------ End of SPACE Digest ******************* ----------------------------------------------------------------- gopher://quux.org/ conversion by John Goerzen of http://communication.ucsd.edu/A-News/ This Usenet Oldnews Archive article may be copied and distributed freely, provided: 1. There is no money collected for the text(s) of the articles. 2. The following notice remains appended to each copy: The Usenet Oldnews Archive: Compilation Copyright (C) 1981, 1996 Bruce Jones, Henry Spencer, David Wiseman.