Space Forum / Astronomy / July 2008

http://twistedphysics.typepad.com/about.html
"I'm a former English major turned science writer, through
serendipitous accident: I stumbled into writing about physics, drifted
further and further into the field, then woke up one day and
exclaimed, "Hey! I'm a science writer!"

http://twistedphysics.typepad.com/cocktail_party_physics/2008/06/seeing-the-ligh.html
Jennifer Ouellette the science writer: "He teamed up with a chemist
named Edward Morley to refine his basic prototype apparatus. In the
seminal experiment, the light as reflected back and forth along the
arms repeatedly. The entire apparatus was housed in a closed room in
the basement of a stone building to shut out vibrations and variations
in temperature (which might cause the brass arms to expand or
contract), and they placed the experiment on a large block of marble
floating in a pool of mercury to further reduce vibrations. To their
surprise, there were no interference effects at all. In essence, the
speed of the earth through the aether was, for all intents and
purposes, zero. So there was no need for an aether at all, and
furthermore, the speed of light in a vacuum appeared to be independent
of the speed of the observer."

Obviously Jennifer Ouellette the science writer has been misled by
silly Einsteinians such as Stephen Hawking. If she had bumped into the
writings of clever Einsteinians such as John Norton the situation
could be different:

http://www.hawking.org.uk/lectures/dice.html
Stephen Hawking: "Interestingly enough, Laplace himself wrote a paper
in 1799 on how some stars could have a gravitational field so strong
that light could not escape, but would be dragged back onto the star.
He even calculated that a star of the same density as the Sun, but two
hundred and fifty times the size, would have this property. But
although Laplace may not have realised it, the same idea had been put
forward 16 years earlier by a Cambridge man, John Mitchell, in a paper
in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society. Both Mitchell
and Laplace thought of light as consisting of particles, rather like
cannon balls, that could be slowed down by gravity, and made to fall
back on the star. But a famous experiment, carried out by two
Americans, Michelson and Morley in 1887, showed that light always
travelled at a speed of one hundred and eighty six thousand miles a
second, no matter where it came from. How then could gravity slow down
light, and make it fall back."

http://www.time.com/time/time100/poc/magazine/a_brief_history_of_rela6a.html
Stephen Hawking: "But Michelson and Morley found no daily or yearly
differences between the two beams of light. It was as if light always
traveled at the same speed relative to you, no matter how you were
moving."

http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/archive/00001743/02/Norton.pdf
John Norton: "Einstein regarded the Michelson-Morley experiment as
evidence for the principle of relativity, whereas later writers almost
universally use it as support for the light postulate of special
relativity......THE MICHELSON-MORLEY EXPERIMENT IS FULLY COMPATIBLE
WITH AN EMISSION THEORY OF LIGHT THAT CONTRADICTS THE LIGHT
POSTULATE."

Pentcho Valev
pvalev@yahoo.com