Volume 23: Pages 473-482, 2010
First-order ether drift experiment
Ling Jun Wang 1
1Department of Physics, Geology and Astronomy, University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, Chattanooga, Tennessee 37403, USA
We have carried out a first-order ether drift experiment over a period of 2 years. The signal to noise ratio of our first-order experiment is four orders of magnitude greater than that of the second-order experiments. The rotational velocity and the orbital velocity of Earth, and the galactic orbital velocity of the solar system with respect to the ether have been measured to be, respectively, 0.051, −0.19, and 0.30 km/s, with a statistical error of 0.94 km/s. These velocities are merely 14%, 0.6%, and 0.15% of the kinetic velocities of Earth and the Solar System with respect to the Milky Way. The results show that the ether drift velocity with respect to Earth is zero well within experimental uncertainty. Since this uncertainty is greater than the velocity due to Earth’s rotation, the experimental error needs to be further reduced to establish the “null result” with respect to Earth’s rotation beyond doubt. Our experiment is fundamentally different in principle from the traditional ether drift experiments based on the interference of light. In particular, our experiment is free of the fringe-running problems during the rotation of the interferometer and therefore contributes a truly independent experiment from the interference experiments.
Keywords: Ether Drift Experiment, Experimental Relativity, Null Result
Received: January 11, 2010; Accepted: June 11, 2010; Published Online: July 29, 2010
