Can a Michelson-Morley Experiment Designed with Current Solar Velocity Distinguish between Non-Relativistic and Relativistic Theories?

Abstract

If Michelson were to answer the question posed in the title, given the line of reasoning he used in 1881, Michelson would seat at his desktop computer to calculate the expected fringeshifts for several solar speeds around 400 km/s and various directions of motion. Present author did exactly the same in 2001 to plan his repetition of Michelson and Morley’s (MM) 1887 experiment. The paper sketchedly summarizes the procedure to calculate expected fringeshifts in the MM interferometer for solar speeds available at Miller’s epoch. In a pre-relativistic context, amplitudes of several fringeshifts may be expected in both MM and Miller experiments. However, all interferometer experiments up to 1930 were designed under the (incorrect from a modern viewpoint) assumption that fringeshifts would be smaller than one fringe-width. The inescapable conclusion is that those experiments were not appropriate to measure the true value of solar motion, always yielding a small, but lower than expected, value for solar speed. The ensuing “negative” interpretation led to the birth of relativity theory and to a new series of experiments implicitly designed to test the relativistic hypothesis of length-contraction, while the earlier “positive” experiments were designed to test a different hypothesis: whether the motion of Earth relative to some preferred frame can be measured using an interferometer of constant dimensions. With the benefit of hindsight this writer repeated the MM experiment, correcting main weaknesses identified up to the Michelson-Morley-Miller (MMM) measurements at Mount Wilson from April 1925 to February 1926. A new possible reinterpretation of the MMM data as a sequence of stationary measurements is pointed out. Our Michelson-Morley-Miller-Munera (MMMM) experiment at Bogota (Colombia) from January 2003 to June 2005 gave values for solar absolute velocity in the same range as those obtained by astronomical means. Surprisingly, our results are compatible with modern third-party MM-type experiments designed and interpreted within relativistic contexts. Thus, a so far unexplored possibility arises: can interferometric experiments distinguish between pre-relativistic and relativistic theories? Our answer is negative.