yes Rama.... your worst nightmare... someone familiar with physics...I obtained my BSc from the University of Melbourne in 1979 with a physics major. I then read Engineering and obtained BEng and later an MBA... so please don't expect me to be phased by ad hominem attacks such as "what makes you such and expert in physics" and all the attempts to paint me as a "know it all". I claim no expertise, but I do claim the capability to understand sound reasoning in matters of physics and engineering when I hear it or read it. I would speculate that you may find discussions with me a pleasant change compared to persons that obtain their knowledge of these matters directly from the doubly entendred “Big Bang Theory television series.. As a very special favour to you, I shall present some very, very sound reasoning for you to cogitate on, adapted from Malcolm Bowden. As I did with Model29, I welcome you to the real world, now becoming heavily populated!
The Michelson Morley Experiment was expected to demonstrate that earth moved through the Aether at 30km/s because, after all, wasn't this the speed of the earth around the sun in the direction of travel? It was very, very awkward when the results were between 1 and 10 km/s wasn't it? In a desperate attempt to explain this RATHER embarrassing result, the Fitzgerald-Lorenz contraction was invented, with absolutely no justification provided for this “solution”. This solution was only invented to overcome the idea that the earth was stationary in the Aether. To complete this travesty, the Einstein myth and “Special Relativity” were invented to “abolish” the Aether. Einstein's biographer commented: “The problem that now faced science was considerable. For there seemed to be only three alternatives. The first was that the earth was standing still, which meant scuttling the whole Copernican theory and was unthinkable (
). The second was that the Aether was carried along by the earth in its passage through space, a possibility which had already been ruled out... by a number of experiments, notably those of... James Bradley. The third solution was that the Aether simply did not exist, which to many nineteenth century scienties was equivalent to scrapping current views of light, electricity and magnetism and starting again.” Ronald Clark, 1971
In fact, the first possibility is the only one that fits all of the results of the experiments carried out... i.e. the earth is stationary in a rotating Aether. Einstein's relativity theory was supposedly verified by the Transit of Venus experiment, the results of which were HOPELESS and would not possibly stand scrutiny today.
The Michelson Gale Experiment demonstrated that the Aether was passing across the surface of the earth once every twenty four hours. However, it was unclear if the earth was moving or the Aether.
The Airy experiment proved that water filled telescopes did not have to be tilted more than air filled telescopes because the moving starlight was carried by a rotating Aether that was passing across a stationary earth. If the earth was moving, then the water filled telescope would need more tilt.
Finally, the Sagnac experiment proving that there IS an Aether. He split a beam of light and sent the two beams in opposite directions around a path, recombined the beams, and noted their interference fringes. The whole system was on a turntable anhe then turned it at 2 revolutions per second, remeasured the fringes and found they had changed. This was due to the movement of the mirrors, which made the parth for one beam longer and the other shorter. This proved that the Aether existed because once the light left the source, its speed was controlled by the comparatively stationary Aether in the laboratory. THIS DEMOLISHED THE THEORY OF SPECIAL RELATIVITY.