Dayton C Miller

Dayton C. Miller
Dayton C. Miller
Born	March 13, 1866; Strongsville, Ohio, United States
Died	February 22, 1941 (aged 74); Cleveland, Ohio, United States
Residence	Cleveland, OH, United States
Nationality	American
Alma mater	Baldwin University; Princeton University
Known for	Thirty years of ether-drift interferometry at Mount Wilson; the phonodeik
	Scientific career
Fields	Physicist, Astronomer, acoustician
Institutions	Case School of Applied Science, Cleveland

Dayton Clarence Miller (13 March 1866 – 22 February 1941) was an American physicist, astronomer and acoustician who spent more than three decades measuring the drift of the Earth through the ether, and who reported — consistently, and to the end of his life — that he had found it.

Miller occupies an unusual position in the literature collected on this wiki. He was not a dissident. He was as established as a physicist of his era could be: head of physics at the Case School of Applied Science for forty-three years, a member of the National Academy of Sciences, and president of the American Physical Society, in which capacity he delivered the 1926 address announcing his result. He worked with Edward Morley, co-author of the experiment his own work extended.

He matters here because his data did not go away. A large, careful, decades-long body of measurement, produced by a respected experimentalist using the most sensitive apparatus of its day, reported a small but systematic effect that the theory adopted in his lifetime says should not exist. That result was set aside rather than refuted — and much of the research documented on this wiki begins by going back to it. See Michelson–Morley experiment and Preferred frame.

Education

Graduated from Baldwin University (later Baldwin Wallace University), Berea, Ohio, 1886
Doctorate in astronomy, Princeton University, 1890, under the astronomer Charles A. Young

Career

Miller joined the Case School of Applied Science in Cleveland in 1890 and became head of its physics department in 1893, holding the position until his retirement in 1936.

His work outside the ether question was substantial and is worth recording, because it bears on how his interferometry should be judged. Following Röntgen's discovery of X-rays in 1895 he used cathode-ray tubes to make some of the earliest photographic images of concealed objects, including a bullet lodged in a man's limb. A lifelong musician, in 1908 he devised the phonodeik, an instrument that photographically recorded the shapes of sound waves, and used it to compare the waveforms of instruments made from different materials. He assembled a collection of some 1,500 flutes and related materials, bequeathed with his papers to the Library of Congress.

This is the record of a meticulous instrument-builder — a point his defenders press, since the case against his ether result rests on the claim that he failed to control for a systematic error.

The ether-drift experiments

In 1900 Miller began collaborating with Edward Morley on the detection of ether drift, using apparatus derived from the 1887 Michelson–Morley interferometer. The two published a null result in 1904.

Miller then continued alone, and did not stop. He rebuilt and refined the interferometer, moved it to the Mount Wilson observatory site in California to get above the possible screening effect of surrounding buildings and terrain, and accumulated — over the following decades — more than two hundred thousand readings.

His result, announced in his 1926 presidential address to the American Physical Society and set out fully in a 1933 review in Reviews of Modern Physics, was not the null result the textbooks record. He found a small, systematic fringe shift corresponding to a drift of roughly 8 to 10 km/s — far below the ~30 km/s expected from the Earth's orbital motion through a stationary ether, but decidedly not zero.

Two features of the result are what make it hard to dismiss, and both are stressed by the researchers who have returned to it:

It was systematic, not random. The effect had a definite magnitude and a definite direction.
The direction varied with sidereal time, not civil time — the signature of something fixed with respect to the stars rather than to the Earth or the laboratory. A thermal artefact of the building would be expected to follow the solar day.

Einstein, and the temperature objection

The result attracted Einstein's attention, since as he acknowledged a genuine positive result would be incompatible with special relativity. His suggestion was that temperature variations across the apparatus might produce the effect.

Miller's reply is worth quoting in full, because the dispute over his work has turned on this point ever since:

The trouble with Professor Einstein is that he knows nothing about my results. … He ought to give me credit for knowing that temperature differences would affect the results. He wrote to me in November suggesting this. I am not so simple as to make no allowance for temperature.
— Dayton C. Miller

The Shankland reanalysis, and the dispute over it

In 1955 — fourteen years after Miller's death — Robert S. Shankland and collaborators published a reanalysis concluding that the periodic signal could be accounted for by small temperature gradients together with statistical scatter. Mainstream physics has accepted that verdict since, and treats the Mount Wilson result as a thermal and systematic artefact.

The researchers documented on this wiki regard that disposal as inadequate, and the objections are specific rather than general:

The reanalysis was published after Miller could answer it, and its author had been Miller's junior colleague.
A temperature effect would be expected to track the solar day; Miller's signal tracked the sidereal day.
Critics who have gone back to the raw records report a coherence and regularity in the data that they argue is too orderly to be thermal noise.

The most striking of these objections came from an unexpected quarter. Maurice Allais, the French Nobel laureate in economics and an experimentalist in his own right, re-binned Miller's readings by sidereal rather than civil time and reported a coherent sidereal-diurnal component together with a geometric regularity — the centres of the elliptical hodographs falling on a circle. He published this in the Comptes Rendus de l'Académie des Sciences in 1999, and followed it in 2000 with a note addressing the temperature question directly: a sustained rebuttal of Shankland which he held to be statistically inadequate and, in places, contradicted by data inside Shankland's own paper.

Related work on this wiki

Miller's data has been the starting point for a considerable body of work by researchers catalogued here. This is the sense in which a non-dissident belongs on a dissident wiki: his measurements are the evidence, and the argument is over what they mean.

James DeMeo has examined Miller's original records directly and defends their integrity, in Dayton Miller's Discovery of the Dynamic Aether Drift (1996) and in his book Heretic's Notebook. His is the most sustained modern defence of Miller's experimental care.
Glen W Deen has worked on the data itself, in Reanalyzing Dayton C. Miller's Raw Interferometer Data (Journal of New Energy, 2003), D. C. Miller's 1933 Cosmic Ether Model, and — most strikingly — D. C. Miller's Ether Wind Velocity Predicts Rotation of the CMBR Anisotropy Vector, which compares Miller's drift with the cosmic microwave background dipole.
Reginald T Cahill pursues the same connection in Michelson-Morley Experiments Revisited and the Cosmic Background Radiation Preferred Frame and treats Miller as one of a series of genuine detections of absolute motion, alongside his own reanalysis of the 1887 data. The suggestion common to Deen and Cahill is that Miller was measuring the same preferred frame the CMB dipole now reveals.
Jean Pierre Vigier offered a theoretical route in Relativistic Interpretation (with Non-Zero Photon Mass) of the Small Ether Drift Velocity Detected by Michelson, Morley and Miller, treating the small detected drift as physically real and accommodating it with a non-zero photon mass.
Flavio Tabanelli argues for the continuity of the whole series in Coherence and Continuity of the Non-Null Experimental Results by Michelson, Morley and Miller — that Michelson, Morley and Miller form one body of consistent non-null data rather than a null result followed by an anomaly.
Hector A Munera has reanalysed the historical interferometry for systematic error and argues its compatibility with absolute space.
Maurice Allais — the sidereal re-binning and the rebuttal of Shankland described above.

The wider argument these feed into is set out at Michelson–Morley experiment, Preferred frame and Aether.

Assessment

What is not in dispute is that Miller was a capable and careful experimentalist, that he took the temperature objection seriously, and that he accumulated a body of data far larger than any comparable experiment of the period. Even those who reject his interpretation have generally acknowledged the quality of the work.

What is in dispute is what the residual means. The mainstream position is that a small signal, unreproduced by other investigators and explicable by thermal gradients, is an artefact — and it is a fair point that Miller's fringe shifts of about 0.08 stand well apart from the roughly 0.01 recorded in contemporary experiments, including his own 1904 work with Morley. The position argued here is that a signal following the sidereal day is not what a thermal artefact looks like, that the 1955 disposal was never subjected to the scrutiny the original claim received, and that a result of this consequence should not have been settled by a reanalysis its subject could not answer.

Miller himself never withdrew. He continued the measurements into the 1930s and defended them to the end of his career — which is why, more than eighty years after his death, researchers are still going back to his notebooks.

Selected papers

1934 – George Joos and Dayton C. Miller, "Note on the Repetition of the Michelson-Morley Experiment" — Physical Review S2, 45(2), 114
1933 – "The Ether-Drift Experiment and the Determination of the Absolute Motion of the Earth" — Reviews of Modern Physics 5(3), 203–242
1926 – "Ether-drift Experiments at Mount Wilson in February, 1926" — National Academy of Sciences; Physical Review S2, 27(6), 812
1926 – "Significance of Ether-drift Experiments of 1925 at Mount Wilson" — Address of the President, American Physical Society; Science 63, 433–443. AAAS prize paper
1922 – "Ether-drift Experiments at Mount Wilson Solar Observatory" — Physical Review S2, 19(4), 407–408
1898 – Henry T. Eddy, Edward W. Morley and Dayton C. Miller, "The Velocity of Light in the Magnetic Field" — Physical Review S1, 7(5), 283–295

Harvey Fletcher, "Biographical Memoir of Dayton Clarence Miller 1866–1941", National Academy of Sciences Biographical Memoirs 23(3), 1943.

Books

Honors

Miller was a member of the National Academy of Sciences (elected 1921), the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society. During the 1920s he served as secretary, vice-president and president of the American Physical Society, and as chairman of the Division of Physical Sciences of the National Research Council. From 1931 to 1933 he was president of the Acoustical Society of America. His honors included the Edward Longstreth Medal, the Elliott Cresson Medal and the AAAS Newcomb Cleveland Prize.

External links

Biographical Memoir, National Academy of Sciences
Dayton C. Miller Flute Collection, Library of Congress