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  • Re: MMX at let's say .95c maybe get some kind of non-null results?

    From amirjf nin@21:1/5 to Tom Roberts on Wed Mar 27 23:58:19 2024
    On 9/24/2023 1:57 PM, Tom Roberts wrote:
    On 9/24/23 11:10 AM, Alan B wrote:
    On Sunday, September 24, 2023 at 11:54:28 AM UTC-4, Dono. wrote:
    On Sunday, September 24, 2023 at 8:28:25 AM UTC-7, Alan B wrote:
    Maybe?
    Not

    Almost surely not.

    https://www.nature.com/articles/321734a0.pdf

    They are concerned about the propagation of the outgoing ray being
    influenced by the reflected ray, and vice-versa -- that requires
    nonlinear electrodynamics, with nonlinear effects being significant for
    the light rays involved. Our current best models of electrodynamics are linear, and the linearity has been tested at VASTLY higher intensities
    than occur in the MMX.

    In our current best theories of electrodynamics, as long as the
    apparatus is at rest in a locally-inertial frame, the MMX is predicted
    to yield a null result, regardless of how its frame might be moving.

    Tom Roberts

    Tom Roberts,

    You say "as long as the apparatus is at rest..."

    So, what if an MMX is in low earth orbit? How would that be "at rest"?

    Alan B.

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  • From Tom Roberts@21:1/5 to amirjf nin on Thu Mar 28 17:11:44 2024
    On 3/27/24 10:58 PM, amirjf nin wrote:
    On 9/24/2023 1:57 PM, Tom Roberts wrote:
    In our current best theories of electrodynamics, as long as the
    apparatus is at rest in a locally-inertial frame, the MMX is
    predicted to yield a null result, regardless of how its frame
    might be moving.

    You say "as long as the apparatus is at rest..." So, what if an MMX
    is in low earth orbit? How would that be "at rest"?

    You omitted the important caveat: "... at rest in a locally-inertial
    frame". The MMX had arms 11 meters long, so the round-trip of light
    takes ~ 36 nanoseconds. In 36 ns, Newtonian gravitation predicts it will
    fall 0.5*g*t^2 = ~ 5E-15 meters -- that is how far a locally-inertial
    frame will move relative to the orbiting apparatus. That is roughly 1E8
    times smaller than the wavelength of visible light, and is utterly undetectable.

    So for all practical purposes, an MMX in orbit can be considered to be
    at rest in a locally inertial frame. Until and unless you can come up
    with a detector that can resolve better than 1E-8 wavelength (the MMX
    resolved about 0.1 wavelength).

    Tom Roberts

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