Galaxies strung like necklace beads

Well I guess I wouldn't want to live where you are spendi. I'm not into BDSM.

But that thought experiment was verified. Einstein made a guess at how light worked, just like previous scientists had, and like all other physicists, he used his guess to make predictions. Predictions like the famous clock experiment, where the plane flew around the world and it was found that its atomic clock was off from the atomic clock on the ground....

An Explanation of Dayton Miller's Anomalous "Ether Drift" Result
Authors: Thomas J. Roberts
(Submitted on 24 Aug 2006 (v1), last revised 15 Oct 2006 (this version, v3))
Abstract: In 1933 Dayton Miller published in this journal the results of his voluminous observations using his ether drift interferometer, and proclaimed that he had determined the "absolute motion of the earth". This result is in direct conflict with the prediction of Special Relativity, and also with numerous related experiments that found no such signal or "absolute motion". This paper presents a complete explanation for his anomalous result by: a) showing that his results are not statistically significant, b) describing in detail how flaws in his analysis procedure produced a false signal with precisely the properties he expected, and c) presenting a quantitative model of his systematic drift that shows there is no real signal in his data. In short, this is every experimenter's nightmare: he was unknowingly looking at statistically insignificant patterns in his systematic drift that mimicked the appearance of a real signal. An upper limit on "absolute motion" of 6 km/sec is derived from his raw data, fully consistent with similar experimental results and the prediction of Special Relativity. The key point of this paper is the need for a comprehensive and quantitative error analysis. The concepts and techniques used in this analysis were not available in Miller's day, but are now standard. These problems also apply to the famous measurements of Michelson and Morley, and to most if not all similar experiments; appendices are provided discussing several such experiments.

Vengoropatubus wrote:

But that thought experiment was verified. Einstein made a guess at how light worked, just like previous scientists had, and like all other physicists, he used his guess to make predictions. Predictions like the famous clock experiment, where the plane flew around the world and it was found that its atomic clock was off from the atomic clock on the ground....

I don't claim to know enough about that one to argue the point other than that there might be some other explanation for the phenomena.

The question is, what evidence do you have that the Dayton Miller experiment was flawed?

The only way another theory can be correct is if it makes exactly the same predictions as Special Relativity, because relativistic mechanics has been verified over and over for a century.

gungasnake wrote:

Vengoropatubus wrote:

But that thought experiment was verified. Einstein made a guess at how light worked, just like previous scientists had, and like all other physicists, he used his guess to make predictions. Predictions like the famous clock experiment, where the plane flew around the world and it was found that its atomic clock was off from the atomic clock on the ground....

I don't claim to know enough about that one to argue the point other than that there might be some other explanation for the phenomena.

The question is, what evidence do you have that the Dayton Miller experiment was flawed?

The fact that the same experiment was run numerous times by physicists, many of whom, by the way, had Phds in physics based on the luminiferous aether to preserve. When those physicists ran the experiment, they found no substantial aether drift. Tell me gunga, what were those other physicists doing wrong?

Brandon9000 wrote:

The only way another theory can be correct is if it makes exactly the same predictions as Special Relativity, because relativistic mechanics has been verified over and over for a century.

I don't think you're actually correct on this Brandon. For another theory to be correct, it would only have to predict observed phenomena that present theories cannot account for, or predict phenomena with more accuracy.

But if a new theory predicted the phenomena more accurately, wouldn't that be a different prediction than SR?

Maybe scale relativity will get there...