Anthony F. Maers
Anthony F. Maers | |
|---|---|
| Known for | The primacy of the Doppler effect, a Doppler-based alternative to special relativity, modern reconstruction of the Fizeau experiment |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | Physics, Biological statistics and computational biology |
| Institutions | Department of Biological Statistics and Computational Biology, Cornell University |
Anthony F. Maers is a researcher in the Department of Biological Statistics and Computational Biology at Cornell University who, with Randy Wayne of Cornell's Laboratory of Natural Philosophy, has argued that the observations underpinning special relativity can be accounted for without the relativity of space and time — by taking the Doppler effect as primary instead. He is listed in The Worldwide List of Dissident Scientists.
Their case is unusual among the critiques catalogued on this wiki in two respects. It is quantitative — they claim their equation fits the historical data better than the standard treatment, and support the claim with a statistical test. And it is falsifiable — they identify a specific measurement on which their theory and special relativity make different predictions, and propose the experiment.
The primacy of the Doppler effect
The starting point is an observation about a choice Einstein made, and it is the cleanest statement of the position. In any solution to a wave equation, the angular wave vector k pairs with the distance vector r, and the angular frequency ω pairs with the time t. When the source and observer are in relative motion, something in these pairs must depend on velocity — but the formalism does not say which.
Einstein assigned the velocity dependence to r and t: space contracts and time dilates. Wayne and Maers assign it instead to k and ω: the wavelength and frequency of the light change, which is simply the Doppler effect. As Wayne puts it, it is "only a matter of taste which members of the pairs one assumes to depend on the relative velocity of the source and observer."
From this they construct a new relativistic wave equation which, they argue, accounts for the propagation of light between two inertial frames — including the relativity of simultaneity, and the fact that charged particles cannot exceed the speed of light — while leaving space and time alone.
The limiting speed is recovered dynamically rather than kinematically. In Wayne's related work, Doppler-shifted photons in any space above absolute zero exert a velocity-dependent viscous force on moving charged particles, so that light itself prevents charges from reaching its speed. Compare the derivation of a limiting velocity from thermodynamics in Pharis E Williams's Dynamic Theory — a different route to the same instinct, that c should be a consequence rather than a postulate.
The Fizeau experiment
Maers's principal contribution is the 2011 paper with Wayne, Rethinking the Foundations of the Theory of Special Relativity: Stellar Aberration and the Fizeau Experiment, published in the African Physical Review — a 59-page treatment with 13 figures.
The target is well chosen. Einstein told R. S. Shankland in 1950 that stellar aberration and Fizeau's measurement of light in moving water "were enough" for him to develop special relativity, and wrote in his popular book that the Fizeau result "decides in favour of" relativistic velocity addition, "and the agreement is, indeed, very exact." This is the experiment Einstein called "a crucial test in favour of the theory of relativity."
Maers and Wayne take it on directly, and claim their equation fits it better:
The new relativistic wave equation based on the primacy of the Doppler effect is quantitatively more accurate than the standard theory based on the Fresnel drag coefficient or the relativity of space and time in accounting for the results of Fizeau's experiment on the optics of moving media.
— Maers & Wayne, Rethinking the Foundations of the Theory of Special Relativity (2011)
The numbers
The claim is backed by a comparison across seven historical datasets — Fizeau's original measurement, Michelson and Morley's 1886 repetition, and five of Zeeman's. Comparing predicted with observed fringe shifts:
- Fresnel drag coefficient / special relativity — mean discrepancy +0.100 fringes (SD 0.064)
- Relativistic Doppler equation — mean discrepancy −0.035 fringes (SD 0.023)
A one-tailed t-test for two samples of unequal variances gives t = 5.2617, p = 0.0005, n = 7. Einstein had cited Zeeman's agreement with relativity as good "to within one per cent"; Maers and Wayne claim their equation does better by more than a factor of two.
Whatever one makes of the theory, this is the right way to argue: a specific numerical comparison on the theory's own crucial test, with the statistics shown.
A test that would decide it
The paper's most valuable feature is that it does not stop at reinterpretation. The two accounts diverge on a measurable quantity.
The Fresnel drag coefficient — and special relativity, which reproduces it — makes the fringe shift produced by a moving medium depend on the refractive index of that medium. The Doppler-based equation predicts the fringe shift is independent of refractive index.
Maers and Wayne therefore propose an experiment: measure the interference fringe shift generated by moving media of different refractive indices. The theories give different answers, so the measurement decides between them. Few of the critiques of relativity documented on this wiki reach this point.
Experimental work
Maers also worked on the apparatus. At Cornell he helped build a modern Fizeau interferometer using laser light, digital image capture and computer analysis, to reproduce the classic experiments of Fizeau, Michelson and Morley, and Zeeman on the optics of bodies in relative motion — the historical measurements the theoretical paper analyses, remade with instrumentation the originals could not command.
This connects the work to the long re-examination of the aether-drift experiments catalogued at Michelson–Morley experiment and Aether.
Randy Wayne and the Laboratory of Natural Philosophy
The theoretical programme is principally Wayne's; Maers is his co-author on the Fizeau work. Wayne is a biophysical cell biologist at Cornell, and the papers are written from that vantage — one is subtitled "A Biophysical Cell Biologist's Contribution to Physics", and argues that a researcher used to identifying viscous forces in and around living cells is well placed to notice a velocity-dependent viscous force acting on moving charges.
His laboratory is named, aptly for this wiki, the Laboratory of Natural Philosophy, in Cornell's Department of Plant Biology. Beyond the Doppler papers he has proposed unifying Newton's second law with the second law of thermodynamics through "optomechanical friction", arguing that because such friction is universal no real system is conservative — and so that the time-reversal invariance of both Newton's and Einstein's mechanics is an artefact of leaving temperature out.
Wayne does not yet have a page on this wiki.
Assessment
The work's strengths are real and worth stating plainly. It was published in a refereed journal, it engages the historical data quantitatively rather than rhetorically, it addresses the experiment its opponents regard as decisive, and it proposes a discriminating test. Wayne's related papers appeared in Acta Physica Polonica B, a long-established journal.
The reservations are equally plain. The claim has attracted essentially no engagement from the physics community; the arXiv postings sit in the General Physics section; and the proposed refractive-index experiment does not appear to have been carried out by anyone else — so the test that could settle the matter remains unperformed. A reanalysis of nineteenth-century fringe measurements, however careful, also carries the difficulty that the original data were not gathered with this question in mind.
Little is recorded about Maers personally beyond his Cornell affiliation and this body of work.
Papers
- 2011 – "Rethinking the Foundations of the Theory of Special Relativity: Stellar Aberration and the Fizeau Experiment" (with R. Wayne) — African Physical Review 5, 7–40; arXiv:1105.2305
- "The Fizeau Experiment: Experimental Investigation of the Relativistic Doppler Effect" (with C. Furnas and R. Wayne)