Page:Amazing Stories Volume 21 Number 06.djvu/153



If you will imagine it, perhaps someone will be inspired to do it. This department is for your ideas, no matter how "wild" they may seem; who knows, they may be the spur to some man's thinking and thereby change our destiny! Tell us your thoughts.

ment of the ether that could be detected under ANY experimental conditions.

Nevertheless, the Michelson-Morley experiments DID NOT COVER EVERY POSSIBLE CONDITION. A careful study of those experiments will show anyone that they could not possibly have measured any drift of the ether TOWARD THE CENTER OF THE EARTH. In other words, the ether could be flowing THROUGH the apparatus used by Michelson in both types of experiments he performed TOWARD THE CENTER OF THE EARTH, and that velocity could not possibly register in his interferometer!

He did not think of this possibility because the accepted concept of the ether gave it the property of being incapable of affecting matter and altering its velocity as it drifted through the ether.

If we deny that and postulate that the slightest drift of ether will cause matter to change its velocity, then it follows that all fields: gravity, positive electrical, negative electrical, and magnetic are ether drifts of some sort.

Then the effect of gravity is the effect of an ether drift!

If it is, there should be some way to measure the velocity of this drift.

N SEARCHING for some method to fill the gap left by the Michelson-Morley experiments, and measure the possible downward drift of the ether, I first decided to use essentially the same system that Michelson used, but with a more rigid setup, and rotated on a horizontal shaft. The drawback to that setup was that the change in shape of the frame due to the shift of gravitational stresses as it rotated would affect the measurements and hence the results would be inconclusive. Also it would be a very expensive setup, since it would require a solid steel plate at least six inches thick and ten feet in diameter, fixed on a heavy shaft and set on a huge concrete foundation.

Nevertheless, since it seemed the only way to perform the experiment, I was determined to go through with it and had even spent several months tracking down the various parts needed.

Then a much simpler idea came to me which could give much more certain results, and immediate (though inaccurate) confirmation that there IS a downward drift of the ether, IF THERE IS ONE.

The idea is pictured in the diagram shown with this article. Simply expressed, if a mirror is placed flat on the floor and two surveyor's transits are set up about five feet on either side of it, so that they look down on the mirror from a height of about five feet, and the first transit is centered on a thin line scratched in the silver of the mirror; then the second transit is moved about until its hair lines are centered exactly on the line scratched in the mirror, and also the reflection of visible crosshairs plated at the end of the first instrument; then, when you go back to the first instrument which is already centered on the scratch in the mirror, it SHOULD be exactly centered on the reflection of the second instrument's external cross hairs just as the second instrument is on the first—UNLESS THERE IS AN ETHER DRIFT.

If there is an ether drift it will not be possible to have both instruments exactly in line with THE