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
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Date: 14 January 1982 06:31-EST
From: Jerry E. Pournelle <POURNE MIT-MC AT>
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 <REM MIT-MC AT>
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 <JGA MIT-MC AT>
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 <TAW AT S1-A>
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 <KATZ USC-ISIF AT>
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
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