Talk:Kennedy–Thorndike experiment/Archive 1

Old
- Warning: the description is very much messed up (nothing to do with rotation speed and even less with interpretation!), but regretfully I now have no time to correct it - harrylin AT gmx.net (1 day later:) OK, I now corrected the first paragraph. The rest is mostly erroneous. If someone else likes to rewrite the article, please do so only after reading the original paper (PDF, 1.6Mb, I can try to send it to you by email) - too much misinformation is around!


 * OK, I cleaned it up. Harald88 19:36, 22 November 2005 (UTC)

- Some parts of this text are identical to material found here http://physicsweb.org/article/news/6/1/2
 * not anymore! Harald88 20:41, 2 December 2005 (UTC)

....differences in rotational speed between one end and the other (relative to the Earth) would cause a fringe shift to occur. That's wrong. The interferometer was stationary and not turned. At any given point on the Earth's surface, the magnitude and direction of the wind would vary with time of day and season equally for both arms and would cause the fringe shift, dependent on arm length difference. 25.8.05 N. Feist


 * Hi Norbert, how are you? Indeed it was mostly wrong, so I completely rewrote it. Harald88 20:41, 2 December 2005 (UTC)

Alternate views
In his book Theory of Relativity Based on Physical Realtiy Lajos Jánossy analyes the null result of the Kennedy-Thorndike experiment and argues that the interpretation of this result in Kennedy's and Thorndike's paper is wrong since the assumption of the Lorentz contraction of the arms of the interferometer suffices to explain the null result and hence we need not time dilation. As he writes: "Kennedy and Thorndike expressed an opinion in their original paper to the effect that the Lorentz contraction alone is insufficient to explain the result of their experiment. This opinion is quoted in the literature. We show ....that contrary to the general belief the negative outcome of the Kennedy-Thorndike experiment  .... can be fully accounted for in terms of the Lorentz contraction of the arms of the interferometer." (See: Theory of Relativity Based on Physical Reality. Budapest: 1971. pp. 62) Since Jánossy was an excellent expert of relativity theory, I think that his view must be respected and at least it must be mentioned. SzLWiki —Preceding unsigned comment added by SzLWiki (talk • contribs) 11:55, 9 May 2008 (UTC)

As presented the new material defies the prevailing understanding. As such it should be presented in the proper light as an alternate view. If the new view can be shown to be the new prevailing view with evidence, it can be presented as such, but it would have to be weaved in much more usefully than an indented comment that purports to have omniscience. - Taxman Talk 00:15, 17 March 2006 (UTC)


 * Specifically, Ati wrote:
 * While the prevailing popular belief is that "no phase shifts will be detected while the earth moves around the sun", in reality a slow time varying fringe shift was detected by Dayton Miller. Later, Maurice Allais reanalized Miller's data and confirmed the presence of the slow time varying shift. While there was a lot of controversy about the origin of this shift (see Robert Shankland), the controversy has been recently resolved by high precision, modern re-enactments of the experiment. The Kennedy Thorndike experiment predicts a second order effect in v/c where v=k*sin(w*t).
 * - H. Müller, C. Braxmaier, S. Herrmann, O. Pradl, C. Lämmerzahl, J. Mlynek, S. Schiller, and A. Peters: ,Int. J. Mod. Phys. D, 11, 1101-1108 (2002).
 * - H. Müller, C. Braxmaier, S. Herrmann, A. Peters, and C. Lämmerzahl, hep-ph/0212289, Phys. Rev. D 67, 056006 (2003).
 * - C. Braxmaier, H. Müller, O. Pradl, J. Mlynek, A. Peters, S. Schiller, Phys. Rev. Lett. 88, 010401 (2002).
 * - C. Braxmaier, H. Müller, O. Pradl, J. Mlynek, A. Peters, S. Schiller, Phys. Rev. Lett. 88, 010401 (2002).


 * Ati, which of these describe the "modern re-enactments of the experiment" as well as their "prediction"? Please provide the titles, thanks! And am I right that you refer to the Cahill's quantum foam theory?
 * http://www.citebase.org/cgi-bin/citations?id=oai:arXiv.org:physics/0309016
 * If so, it would be more appropriate to link with one sentence to the quantum foam article, and to eventually add such details to that article. Harald88 19:20, 17 March 2006 (UTC)
 * He's currently blocked, so he may not be able to respond. Try emailing him if you like. - Taxman Talk 22:06, 17 March 2006 (UTC)

Another Poor Wikipedia Article
The conclusion of this experiment has been disputed, yet the article states it as a fact. The most recent discussions agree that it does not prove time dilation. No discussion of the extensive controversy is discussed here. Dingle and Ives in particular disputed the conclusions. The problem is that this experiment really proves Ives theory if it is true, since the conclusion assumes the existence of the Fresnel aether in order to justify the time dilation claim. So if you beleive this experiment you have to beleive in Ives aether theory, and not special relativity.71.251.183.186 (talk) 15:12, 30 July 2008 (UTC)
 * No, the KT-experiment is considered one of the most important verifications of special relativity, and is still repeated with increased precision in modern laboratories. --D.H (talk) 18:26, 7 May 2011 (UTC)

Illustrations
D.H - Thanks for expanding on what I wrote. I had left things a bit like the famous Sydney Harris cartoon.

If you need any translated versions of my illustrations for the German Wikipedia, just give me the appropriate translations for any labels. I can relabel the figures and upload them to my Google Docs account for you to use. Stigmatella aurantiaca (talk) 12:12, 25 July 2012 (UTC)


 * I think I can edit the svg images by myself with inkscape, then I will upload them on commons. Thanks again for expanding and illustrating this article! PS: Is there a specific reason why you use both "cc-by-sa-3.0" and "GFDL-self"? Shouldn't the first alone be sufficient?--D.H (talk) 14:35, 25 July 2012 (UTC)


 * Just habit, I guess.
 * Always be sure to convert any text to paths. There is a nasty librsvg bug that can give you immense grief if you don't. See SVG Help. A special SVG validator specific for Wikipedia is available that will catch most but not all rendering bugs before you upload. I'll find the link for you. Before I knew of these tools, you'll find a lot of my early work converted to PNG. Stigmatella aurantiaca (talk) 17:28, 25 July 2012 (UTC)
 * The first image I ever created was this one: File:Myxobacterial msDNA.svg which I converted to PNG for Multicopy single-stranded DNA which I had a special interest in. Stigmatella aurantiaca (talk) 17:49, 25 July 2012 (UTC)
 * I've included both images in Kennedy-Thorndike-Experiment. --D.H (talk) 17:59, 25 July 2012 (UTC)
 * It's interesting that the gray background shows through. I wonder if I can manage a workaround? I've had experience with a similar problem with Template:Multiple image on Michelson-Morley experiment. For that, I substituted a PNG for the top image, but there ought to be a way to keep the SVG.
 * One reason why I don't upload directly to Commons is that rendered images sometimes get cached for a long time. So if I decide that I need to alter a figure, it may be many days before the old cached rendering gets replaced with a new image. That can be very annoying. Stigmatella aurantiaca (talk) 18:44, 25 July 2012 (UTC)


 * Grey background is standard in de.wikipedia .... don't know why. --D.H (talk) 19:20, 25 July 2012 (UTC)

For each image I added a new layer below the main layer, and locked the main layer to prevent accidents. Switching to the lower layer, I added a borderless rectangle and sized it to exactly match the width and height of the image, then changed its fill color to white. I'm sure there must be an easier alternative than an SVG expert could point out to me, but meanwhile, this kludge worked. Stigmatella aurantiaca (talk) 00:52, 26 July 2012 (UTC)

The SVG Check tool is what I was referring to earlier. It's not perfect, but imperfect is better than no check at all. Stigmatella aurantiaca (talk) 01:07, 26 July 2012 (UTC)

If you ever experience a problem with the cache not updating, here is a quote of what I just learned on Wikipedia talk:SVG Help:


 * To AnonMoos – From the client side, how do you signal the Wikimedia server or any other servers along the way to "purge" their images? I've sometimes waited for over a week for "the" cache to clear. All I know for sure is that it's not my client-side. Stigmatella aurantiaca (talk) 07:26, 26 July 2012 (UTC)
 * If you go to directly to the Wikimedia Commons image description page, on most skins there should be a "purge" link or tab, or you can add "&action=purge" / "?action=purge" (depending on context) to the URL... AnonMoos (talk) 16:58, 26 July 2012 (UTC)

Added highly simplified figure of Braxmaier et al., leaving out the electro-optic and acoustic modulators, etc. necessry for the modulation transfer spectroscopy technique to actually work. If you think that is over-simplifying things, I can add them back in, but I think the majority of Wikipedia users wouldn't have much use for that level of detail. Stigmatella aurantiaca (talk) 16:53, 29 July 2012 (UTC)


 * Great work again, thanks! --D.H (talk) 18:22, 29 July 2012 (UTC)