A New Michelson-Morley Experiment

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Scientific Paper
Title A New Michelson-Morley Experiment
Author(s) Cynthia Kolb Whitney, Wilbur Silvertooth
Keywords Michelson-Morley
Published 1992
Journal Physics Essays
Volume 5
Number 1
Pages 82-89

Abstract

We have augmented a Michelson-Morley interferometer with additional instrumentation and secured additional measurements of a type not previously reported by other researchers. Where the original Michelson-Morley experiment looked only at the interference between two beams that had traversed the two interferometer arms, we look at the standing-wave interference within one of the arms as well. Assuming that the interferometer is resident in an inertial coordinate frame, special relativity theory predicts nodes spaced /2 apart. Our experiment shows a departure from this expected nodal spacing. The discrepancy is here shown to be consistent with an anisotropy in the speed of light having the form c(<img alt="theta" align="bottom" border="0" src="http://physicsessays.aip.org/stockgif3/thgr.gif" />) = c/[1+(v0/c) cos (<img alt="theta" align="bottom" border="0" src="http://physicsessays.aip.org/stockgif3/thgr.gif" />) ], where c is the usual 3 ? 108 m/s, v0 is about 378 km/s, and <img alt="theta" align="bottom" border="0" src="http://physicsessays.aip.org/stockgif3/thgr.gif" /> = 0 lies in a unique direction relative to fixed stars. The apparent v0 is consistent with both the known anisotropy of background cosmic radiation and the believed orbital velocity of the Sun in the Milky Way Galaxy.