Volume 3: Pages 161-164, 1990
A New Interpretation of the Silvertooth Experiment
Cynthia Kolb Whitney 1,2
1W.J. Schafer Associates, Inc., Billerica, Massachusetts 01824 U.S.A.
2Tufts University, Electro‐Optics Technology Center, Medford, Massachusetts 02155 U.S.A.
An experiment recently reported by Silvertooth has provoked much discussion, because he originally interpreted its result as delivering a fatal blow to standard relativity theory. The experiment provides an optical measurement of a velocity, which he took to be an absolute linear velocity with respect to an ether of space. The present author believes the experiment indeed measures a velocity, but that it is not necessarily an absolute linear velocity with respect to an ether; instead, it may be a velocity of rotation relative to a center of rotation.
Keywords: special relativity, Sagnac effect, velocity detection
Received: May 30, 1989; Published Online: December 15, 2008
