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
Known for	Ether-drift experiments, Acoustics, Phonodeik
	Scientific career
Fields	Physicist, Acoustician, Astronomer

Dayton Clarence Miller (March 13, 1866 – February 22, 1941) was an American physicist, astronomer, and acoustician, and an accomplished amateur flautist. He spent his entire academic career at the Case School of Applied Science in Cleveland, Ohio, where he headed the physics department for more than four decades. He is best remembered within the history of physics for his long series of ether-drift experiments, an extension of the Michelson–Morley experiment, which he continued for more than three decades and which he interpreted as yielding a small but positive indication of an ether drift.

Biography

Miller was born on March 13, 1866, in Strongsville, Ohio, to Charles Webster Dewey Miller and Vienna Pomeroy Miller. He died in Cleveland, Ohio, on February 22, 1941.

Education

After his family moved to Berea, Ohio, Miller studied at Baldwin University (later Baldwin Wallace University), from which he graduated in 1886. He then pursued graduate study at Princeton University, where he earned a doctorate in astronomy in 1890 under the astronomer Charles A. Young.

Career

In 1890 Miller joined the Case School of Applied Science in Cleveland, and in 1893 he became head of its physics department, a position he held until his retirement in 1936. Following the discovery of X-rays by Wilhelm Röntgen in 1895, Miller used cathode-ray tubes to make some of the earliest photographic images of concealed objects, including a bullet lodged in a man's limb.

Miller was also a lifelong student of music and acoustics. In 1908 he devised the phonodeik, an instrument that recorded the shapes of sound waves photographically, and he used it to compare the waveforms produced by musical instruments made of different materials. Over his lifetime he assembled an extensive collection of flutes and materials relating to the instrument, numbering some 1,500 items at his death; this collection, together with his papers, was bequeathed to the Library of Congress.

Scientific contributions

Ether-drift experiments

In 1900 Miller began collaborating with Edward Morley on the detection of ether drift, then one of the central open problems of fundamental physics. Using apparatus based on that of the earlier Michelson–Morley experiment, Miller and Morley published a null result in 1904.

Miller subsequently continued the work on his own, refining the interferometer and carrying out an enormous number of observations, many of them at the Mount Wilson site in California. Over the course of his career he accumulated hundreds of thousands of interferometer readings. In a widely noted paper of 1926, delivered as his address as retiring president of the American Physical Society, he reported what he interpreted as a small, systematic fringe shift corresponding to an ether drift of roughly 8 to 10 km/s, rather than the much larger value that a stationary ether would imply. He returned to the theme in a comprehensive 1933 review published in Reviews of Modern Physics.

The reported effect was small and was not reproduced by other investigators. Miller's observed fringe shifts, on the order of 0.08 of a fringe, stood well apart from the roughly 0.01-fringe values recorded in contemporary experiments—including his own 1904 work with Morley, which had shown a drift of only about 0.015—and from the numerous null results obtained during the 1920s using both interferometric and other techniques. Albert Einstein took an interest in the claim, acknowledging that a genuine positive result would be incompatible with special relativity, but suggested that variations in temperature might be a source of systematic error. Miller rejected this explanation, remarking:

"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."

A 1955 reanalysis of Miller's data by Robert S. Shankland and collaborators concluded, after his death, that the apparent periodic signal could be accounted for by small temperature gradients and statistical scatter, and the mainstream physics community has since regarded the result as attributable to such systematic and thermal effects rather than to a real ether drift. A minority of researchers who have examined Miller's records closely continue to defend the care and consistency of his measurements, and his decades of meticulous experimental work are widely acknowledged even by those who reject his interpretation.

Honors

Miller was active in many scientific organizations. He 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 American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) Newcomb Cleveland Prize.

Selected papers

Selected papers by Dr. Miller:

Henry T. Eddy, Edward W. Morley, and Dayton C. Miller, "The Velocity of Light in the Magnetic Field," Physics Review, S1, V7, N5, pp. 283-295 (Dec 1898).
Dayton C. Miller, "Ether-drift Experiments at Mount Wilson Solar Observatory," Physics Review, S2, V19, N4, pp. 407-408 (Apr 1922).
Dayton C. Miller, "Significance of Ether-drift Experiments of 1925 at Mount Wilson," Address of the President, American Physical Society, Science, V63, pp. 433-443 (1926). A.A.A.S Prize paper.
Dayton C. Miller, "Ether-drift Experiments at Mount Wilson in February, 1926, National Academy of Sciences, Washington (Apr 1926) {Physics Review, S2, V27, N6, pp. 812 (Jun 1926)}.
Dayton C. Miller, "The Ether-Drift Experiment and the Determination of the Absolute Motion of the Earth," Rev. Mod. Phys., V5, N3, pp. 203-242 (Jul 1933).
George Joos & Dayton C. Miller, "Note on the Repetition of the Michelson-Morley Experiment," Physics Review, S2, V45, N2, pp. 114 (Jan 1934).

Harvey Fletcher, "Biographical Memoir of Dayton Clarence Miller 1866-1941," National Academy of Sciences of the USA Biographical Memoirs, V23, N3, 16pp (1943).

Books

External links

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