The Modern Michelson Morley experiment needs to be revised concerning its counter frequency acquisition setup and by this way it could check both classic not relativistic prediction and the one from "The New Galilean paradigm".
| Scientific Paper | |
|---|---|
| Title | The Modern Michelson Morley experiment needs to be revised
concerning its counter frequency acquisition setup and by this way it could check both classic not relativistic prediction and the one from "The New Galilean paradigm". |
| Read in full | Link to paper |
| Author(s) | Massimo Odasso |
| Keywords | Frequency, Paradigm, Michelson-Morley experiment, Planck |
| Published | 2013 |
Read the full paper here
Abstract
Modern Michelson Morley experiment can be used to test both the classic Stokes - Planck and the New Galilean Age paradigm views for entrained ether theory. These two approaches lead to a significant different quantitative prediction of the expected beat frequency modulation from the (adapted to crossed resonators) laser couple beams interference. The modulation is due to variation of the two way light velocities module difference between the crossed resonators orthogonal directions. The modulation to nominal laser frequency ratio prediction is apparently falsified by Modern Michelson-Morley experiment negative outcome in highly rarefied gases that actually pulls its detection limit till 10. This detection ability is criticized by present author. Moreover an improved frequency counter acquisition setup inside Modern Michelson-Morley experiment is proposed in order to detect the beat frequency modulation. This change will allow determine the better prediction among the one offered by Stokes - Planck classic view and the one by the New Galilean Age paradigm.
(Note: the negative exponent on the detection limit was lost when this abstract was imported into the archive; the printed paper gives it in full.)
Overview
Massimo Odasso's April 2013 paper is an instrumentation critique rather than a new theory of light. Its target is the modern optical-cavity version of the Michelson–Morley experiment reported by Herrmann and co-workers, in which two orthogonal cryogenic resonators, each locked to an Nd:YAG laser, are rotated slowly on a turntable while the beat note between the two stabilised laser frequencies is monitored. That experiment reports a null result at extraordinary precision and is routinely cited as ruling out any ether drift. Odasso does not dispute the apparatus. He disputes the frequency counter acquisition setup — specifically the 1-second counter gate time — and argues that the very rotation that produces the signal also smears it out during the measurement window, so that the quoted sensitivity is not actually available to the search it is used to close.
The claim has a constructive half. Odasso computes what beat-note modulation would be produced by an entrained ether under two different frameworks: the classic Stokes–Planck entrained-ether view, and his own New Galilean paradigm (developed at length in The New Galilean Age). The two give different amplitudes, and both are, he argues, currently unmeasurable for the same instrumental reason. His proposal is therefore a concrete experimental change — shorten the gate from 1 s to 1 ms — that would trade nominal single-shot resolution for the ability to follow the modulation ramp, and thereby let the experiment discriminate between the two entrained-ether pictures, or falsify both. This is a departure from the mainstream treatment in that it declines to read the null result as a bound on anisotropy at all, treating it instead as an artefact of an acquisition choice.
The argument
Turning cavity frequencies into a measurable beat note
Odasso sets up the classical calculation first. With c1, c2 the two-way light velocities along the two resonators of lengths L1, L2, and γ1, γ2 the corresponding fundamental resonant frequencies (the inverses of the two-way transit times), a rotation of the crossed resonators in the presence of an ether drift produces fractional changes Δc/c proportional to Δγ/γ. Because each laser is locked to its cavity with an integer multiplier — G1 = α1γ1, G2 = α2γ2 — and both ratios are close to unity, he obtains the working relation that the normalised difference of two-way light speeds equals the normalised variation of the laser beat note, Δ(G2 − G1)/G1. His stated advantage is practical: since G1 is far greater than γ1, the same fractional effect appears as a much larger absolute frequency swing in the laser beat than in the bare cavity beat.
He then writes the forward and return light-velocity components inside a resonator inclined at angle ϑ to the drift direction, first in the ether frame and then in the resonator frame, imposing the condition that the beam must stay inside the moving cavity. From these he builds γ1(ϑ) and, by substituting ϑ + π/2, γ2. Numerically he steps ϑ through a full 2π rotation in 400 equal increments, using the same parameters as the Herrmann apparatus — L1 = 0.055 m with L2 − L1 under 3 µm, a 1064 nm laser (≈281 THz), and an ether drift of 470 m/s at the equator, the value following from the assumption that the ether frame is at rest with the planet's centre of mass. As a sanity check he notes that his computed mean beat note, about 2 GHz, agrees with the value declared in the source article.
The counter-gate objection
This is the heart of the paper. The published experiment uses a 1 s counter gate to exploit the counter's 12-digit resolution, from GHz in the top digit down to hundredths of a hertz, giving a nominal single-shot sensitivity that further averaging over a year of continuous rotation is said to improve substantially. Odasso's point is that the turntable turns at roughly 45 s per lap, so 1 s of acquisition consumes about 8.8 of his 400 simulation points. If that window sits where the modulation rate is greatest — near n = 50, with one resonator at π/4 and the other at 3π/4 to the drift — the signal itself drifts by 97 Hz during a single acquisition on the classical model, against a peak-to-peak modulation of only 692 Hz. The drift therefore randomises the counter digits down to the hundreds-of-hertz level, so the kilohertz digit is the first that is stable — and it is precisely the digit that does not change between modulation peaks. Moving the window to the modulation peaks does not help, because of "the tradeoff that exists between modulation drift during acquisition" (which improves there) and modulation velocity (which becomes too small to appreciate). His conclusion is that the realistically achievable anisotropy limit is several orders of magnitude worse than the figure claimed before averaging, and about one order short of what would be needed to see the predicted escalation.
The New Galilean paradigm
The second half rebuilds the same calculation inside Odasso's own framework. He postulates an absolute Privileged Reference Frame permeating the universe, which is nevertheless not the sole frame in which light propagates isotropically, and modifies the Galilean transformation with a corrective coefficient in the time equation that "regulates the proper time dilatation of particles in absolute motion". He fixes that coefficient at k = 3.3648219 (with 1% tolerance) by fitting the 1977 CERN storage-ring measurement of muon lifetime at 0.9994c, where the dilation factor was 28.87. The stated tolerance reflects an unknown laboratory velocity relative to the Privileged System, assumed between 0 and 500 km/s. He claims the same framework accounts for the retardation of moving clocks and for intrinsic quantized redshift "in terms of linear progression of quantized absolute velocities", and pairs it with a Local Ether Theory in which surrounding matter — for terrestrial experiments, the whole planet — supplies or absorbs the work needed to add the anisotropic velocity component to an emitted photon.
The mass–frequency chain follows from E = hγ and m = E/c2 (which he attributes to Maxwell's calculation of radiation pressure rather than to Einstein), with the inertial equation reducing the observed Compton frequency of a moving particle. Integrating the work done in accelerating a photon from rest to c gives W ≈ 0.075hγ, and the mass at c becomes 0.0345682 times the rest value — so that a fraction 0.96543 of the rest Compton energy is "released to the Privileged System skeleton" as interaction energy, and is restored if the particle is brought back to rest. A consequence he draws is that the atomic transition energy is not hγ but Et = 1.075hγ, the extra 7.5% being the kinetic work that builds the photon's isotropic speed component.
Feeding these modified emission frequencies through the same resonance condition — forward plus backward phase delay equal to 2π — gives new γ1(ϑ) and γ2(ϑ + π/2), and hence a second simulated rotation curve. The result is the paper's key quantitative discriminator: the New Galilean paradigm predicts a peak-to-peak beat modulation of 10,860 Hz against the classical 692 Hz, with a corresponding in-acquisition drift of 1530 Hz rather than 97 Hz. Notably, the ratio of peak-to-peak amplitude to drift is 7 in both cases, since both share the same sinusoidal period.
What the proposed change would buy
Odasso's recommendation is to cut the gate time from 1 s to 1 ms. This degrades the counter's theoretical resolution from hundredths of a hertz to about tens of hertz, but reduces the modulation drift during acquisition by a factor of a thousand — to about 0.1 Hz on the classical model and about 1.5 Hz on his own — so the digits from tens of hertz up to kilohertz can track the central part of the modulation ramp. He lays out three possible outcomes explicitly: no escalation anywhere from tens of hertz to the kilohertz digits would falsify both theories; detection of a kilohertz escalation would falsify the classical view and support the New Galilean paradigm, which alone predicts it; and detection of hundreds of hertz without kilohertz escalation would do the reverse. He also notes that Levy has used the Herrmann null result to argue against entrained ether in favour of a non-entrained theory — an inference his critique is designed to block.
Assessment
The strongest feature of this paper is that it is a genuinely testable methodological criticism, framed against a specific published experiment, using that experiment's own parameters, and issuing in a concrete change of setting with three enumerated and mutually exclusive outcomes — including the outcome that kills the author's own theory. That is a rarer virtue than it should be. The central observation is also physically sensible in kind: a counter gate is an integrating measurement, and if the quantity being counted changes appreciably within the gate, the effective resolution is set by that change, not by the counter's digit count. Odasso quantifies the effect rather than gesturing at it, deriving the 8.8-point window from the stated 45 s rotation period and computing the in-window drift at the point of maximum slope. The consistency check against the reported ~2 GHz mean beat note is the right instinct, and the observation that the amplitude-to-drift ratio is 7 in both models, being fixed by the shared sinusoidal period, shows he understands which parts of his result are model-dependent and which are not.
The difficulties are correspondingly concrete. Most seriously, the argument treats the analysis as if the experiment simply reads a single counter value and looks for a change — but a slowly rotating anisotropy search is analysed by demodulating at the known rotation frequency and its harmonics over a very long integration, precisely so that a smooth in-window drift becomes signal rather than noise. Odasso never addresses the demodulation, and without doing so his claim that the quoted limit is unavailable does not follow: a drift that is deterministic and phase-locked to the turntable is not the same as randomised digits. Second, the year-long averaging that produces the published limit appears in his account only as an assertion he sets aside; he does not show that his 1 ms proposal, with its far coarser single-shot resolution, would reach a better limit after equivalent averaging, and the arithmetic for that comparison is not given. Third, the entire quantitative comparison assumes the specific entrained-ether drift of 470 m/s at the equator; if the drift were smaller the predicted modulations shrink proportionally and the discriminating power vanishes, but no sensitivity to that assumption is explored.
The New Galilean sections carry weaker material than the instrumentation critique they are meant to support. The coefficient k is fitted to a single datum — the CERN muon lifetime — and then used throughout, which means the framework reproduces that measurement by construction rather than predicting it; the claim that the same coefficient also explains clock retardation generally and quantized redshift is asserted here and referred to the author's book. The proposal that an atomic transition supplies Et = 1.075hγ rather than hγ is a 7.5% offset between transition energy and photon energy, and that is a claim in direct tension with established measurement: atomic and nuclear transition energies are compared with emitted photon frequencies to far better than a part in 106 in ordinary spectroscopy, and the Mössbauer effect ties recoil-free gamma emission energy to the transition energy at the level of parts in 1012. Odasso does not confront that comparison. Similarly, the picture in which a photon loses over 96% of its rest Compton energy to a "Privileged System skeleton" on reaching c is not connected to any independent observable. The honest reading is that the paper's experimental proposal deserves to be evaluated on its own — a shorter gate time is cheap to try — while the theoretical apparatus that supplies the larger of the two predicted modulations rests on assumptions the paper does not defend here.