Jed Rothwell wrote: > Below are some quotes from Collins & Pinch, which I find disturbing.
Disturbing, why? Because they reflect badly on Collins & Pinch? > As I recall from another source, Miller was bitter at the end of his > life. > > > [Miller] rebuilt the apparatus and took readings again on 4, 5 and 6 > September 1924. Miller now found a persistent positive displacement, > and concluded that 'the effects were shown to be real and systematic, > beyond any further question'. Miller was taken quite seriously. Sufficiently seriously, in fact, that a lot of others have run experiments looking for an ether wind, in part because Miller seemed to have found one. There is something which all modern day amateurs need to keep in mind: When Miller did his work, he was TRYING TO SUPPORT THE MAINSTREAM VIEW. Miller was part and parcel with the "mainstream cabal" which resists new and disruptive theories. Einstein's view was STILL the OUTSIDE view. The main 'establishment' point of view had been, and still was, that there was an ether, and it should be detectable. That view was discarded slowly, and with a lot of resistance by a lot of scientists. The view that the ether either isn't there at all or can't be detected was adopted slowly, and through a lot of experimental work, which eventually forced mainstream science to take it seriously. It's easy for a modern day crank to say "Oh, well, all results which disagree with Einstein have just been thrown out, and that includes Miller's work" but that's totally false. In modern times, Einstein's view has carried the day, but back when Morley and Miller were working, it was not that way. It took a lot of experiments, by a lot of people, to convince the world of science that the ether is undetectable. Also keep in mind that Miller *really* wanted to find the ether wind. I have read that his apparatus, while having very high precision, may have been a bit lacking in the accuracy department, which opens up the possibility that it may have produced some rather ambiguous readings -- and the only person taking those readings was not disinterested. It is very hard to avoid a certain amount of experimenter bias in such a situation. The correct thing to do in such a case is do more experiments, with multiple researchers performing them, with many variations. That has been done. The result is that Miller's result was ultimately discarded. Of course, discarding a result of this sort can't be done casually, and a lot of effort by physicists has gone into trying to figure out if Miller's experiments really could have been inaccurate enough to invalidate his results; conclusions, as I recall, tend to be that they could. See, for instance, http://arxiv.org/pdf/physics/0608238 (The author is Tom Roberts, a professional physicist working at Lucent, IIRC. He is a very smart guy, though he can be rather stiff-necked at times.) > > Miller's experiment was different from the others in that he pressed > ahead with the fourth part of the protocol and took further readings > in spring, summer and the following autumn. He concluded, in 1925, > that he had found an observed motion of the earth of about 10 > kilometres per second -- around one third of the result that the > original Michelson experiments were expected to find. In 1925, Miller > was awarded the 'American Association for the Advancement of Science' > prize for this work. > > Thus, although the famous Michelson-Morley experiment of 1887 is > regularly taken as the first, if inadvertent, proof of relativity, in > 1925, a more refined and complete version of the experiment was > widely hailed as, effectively, disproving relativity. This experiment > was not conducted by a crank or charlatan. It was conducted by one of > Michelson's closest collaborators, with the encouragement of > Einstein, and it was awarded a major honour in the scientific > community. > > p. 40 > > . . . > > [various descriptions of improved experiments and more conclusive > results from Miller] > > In spite of this, the argument in physics was over. Other tests of > relativity, including the Eddington observations of 1919 (to be > discussed below), indirectly bolstered the idea that the theory of > relativity was correct and that the velocity of light must be > constant in all directions. The sheer momentum of the new way in > which physics was done the culture of life in the physics community > meant that Miller's experimental results were irrelevant. > > We have travelled a long way from the notion that the > Michelson-Morley experiment proved the theory of relativity. We have > reached the point where the theory of relativity had rendered the > Michelson-Morley experiment important as a sustaining myth, rather > than as a set of results. Results that ran counter to what it was > believed the Michelson-Morley experiment demonstrated were largely > ignored. Think of it this way. The notion of 'anomaly' is used in > science in two ways. It is used to describe a nuisance - 'We'll > ignore that; it's just an anomaly', and to signify serious trouble > 'There are some troublesome anomalies in the existing theory.' The > interferometry results started as serious trouble for the theory of > the aether. The null results passed from anomaly to 'finding' as the > theory of relativity gained adherents. With Miller's positive claims, > interferometry results became, once more, an anomaly, but this time > they were treated as a nuisance rather than a trouble. Miller's > results were 'just an anomaly that needed to be explained away'. > Miller could not change the status of his positive readings from > nuisance to troublesome anomaly even though they were the outcome of > the best experiment yet completed, perhaps the only one which could > truly be said to have tested what it was meant to test. The meaning > of an experimental result does not, then, depend only upon the care > with which it is designed and carried out, it depends upon what > people are ready to believe. > > p. 42 > >
