The chair recognizes David Dyer-Bennet at dd-b at dd-b.net! Make it good... > "chris cunningham" <chrislee at neo.rr.com> writes: > >> From: "David Dyer-Bennet" <dd-b at dd-b.net> >>> Damien Sullivan <phoenix at ugcs.caltech.edu> writes: >>>> Einstein went the other way with the luminiferous aether: if something's >> there >>>> but makes absolutely no difference, we might as well ignore it. >>> >>> Now wait a minute; the ether was ruled out by experiment in 1887 by >>> the Michelson-Morley experiment. Einstein was 8 years old at that >>> point. >> >> there were, iirc, during einstein's time, those who posited that the earth >> might drag the local ether with it, thus explaining the results of the >> michelson-morley experiment with the ether intact but undetectable. > > Ah, were there? Then "makes absolutely no difference" isn't a useful > argument; it's only hard to experiment on locally. Yeah, but how do you tell the difference? That's why we need to put some labs in the Oort Cloud to re-do all those basic physics experiments and see if they still work. What? It's a perfectly reasonable idea... Besides, the acid-heads in the quantum physics crowd keep mumbling about reviving aether theory to explain some of the wierder bits of non-local phenomena. For that matter, from what I know about gravitational theory, Galileo was wrong. Heavy objects *do* fall faster than light objects. It's just that the difference in the degree of accelleration is so slight that you can't measure it without instruments he didn't have. Hell, *we* barely have them. Isn't science fun? --Joe Crow -Everything I need to know about life I learned by killing smart people and eating their brains.-