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Dayton Miller



         


Dayton Clarence Miller (March 13 1866 - February 22, 1941) was an American physicist, astronomer, acoustician, and accomplished amateur flutist.

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Biography

Miller obtained a doctorate in astronomy at Princeton University under Charles A. Young. In 1890, he worked at the Case School of Applied Science in Cleveland, Ohio teaching astronomy, later becoming the head of the physics department in 1893. Following the discovery of x-rays by Wilhelm Röntgen in 1895, Miller used cathode ray tubes built by William Crookes to make some of the first photographic images of concealed objects, including a bullet within a man's limb.

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Aether research

In 1900, he began work with Edward Morley on the detection of aether drift, at the time one of the "hot" areas of fundamental physics. Following on with the basic apperatus as the earlier Michaelson-Morley experiment, Miller and Morley published another null result in 1904. The experiments concerns many physicists dealing with Albert Einstein's theory of relativity.

Miller continued with the experiment, conducting thousands of measurements and eventually developing the most accurate interferometer in the world at that time. The type of experimental apparatus Miller used was very delicate. Dayton Miller performed over 200,000 observations and experiments dealing with the aether and aether drift. A second publication in 1926 showed what appeared to be a small amount of drift, which Miller commented on at several meetings. A thrid in 1933 continued the theme. From 1902 to 1933 Miller performed experiments producing more accurate measurements.

This work on aether was published as a positive results for the existence of an ether drift. However, the effect Miller saw was tiny. In order for it to detect aether, the properties of aether drag would have to more pronounced. Furthermore the measurement was statistically far from any other measurements being carried on at the time, fringe shifts of about 0.01 were being observered in many experiments, while Miller's 0.08 was not duplicated anywhere else -- including Miller's own 1904 experiments with Morley, which showed a drift of only 0.015. The measurements are perfectly consistant with a fringe difference of zero -- the null result that every other experiment was recording.

Einstein was interested in this ether drift theory and acknowledged that a positive result for the existence of ether would invalidate the theory of special relativity, but commented that altitudal influences and temperatures may have provided sources of error in the findings. Miller's commented:

"The trouble with Professor Einstein is that he knows nothing about my results. ... He ought to give me credit for knowing that temperature differences would affect the results. He wrote to me in November suggesting this. I am not so simple as to make no allowance for temperature."

During the 1920s a number of experiments, both interferometry based as in Miller's experiment, and others using entirely different techniques, were conducted and these returned a null result as well. Even at the time, Miller's work was increasingly considered to be a statistical anomaly, an opinion which remains true today given an ever growing body of negative results.

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Analysis

In 1955, Robert S. Shankland, S. W. McCuskey, F. C. Leone, and G. Kuerti performed a re-analysis of of Miller's results. Shankland, who led the report, noted that the "signal" that Miller observed in 1933 is actually composed of points that are an average of several hundred measurements each, and the magnitude of the signal is more than 10 times smaller than the resolution with which the measurements were recorded. Miller's extraction of a single value for the measurement is statistically impossible, the data is too variable to say "this" number is any better than "that" -- the data, from Shankland's position, supports a null result as equally as Miller's positive.

Shankland concluded that Miller's observed signal was partly due to statistical fluctuations and partly due to local temperature conditions and, also, suggested that the results of Miller were due to a systematic error rather than an observed existence of aether. In particular he felt that Miller did not take enough care in guarding against thermal gradients in the room where the experiment took place, as, unlike most interferometry experiments, Miller conducted his in a room where there apperatus was deliberately left open to the elements to some degree.

Shankland believed that Miller's research was a major obstacle to and overshadowed any consideration of a Nobel Prize be awarded to Einstein for his relativity theory. In a 1973 review paper on the experimental development of relativity, Shankland included an August 31, 1954 letter to him by Einstein. Einstein wrote:

I thank you very much for sending me your careful study about the Miller experiments. Those experiments, conducted with so much care, merit, of course, a very careful statistical investigation. This is more so as the existence of a not trivial positive effect would affect very deeply the fundament of theoretical physics as it is presently accepted.
You have shown convincingly that the observed effect is outside the range of accidental deviations and must, therefore, have a systematic cause. You made it quite probable that this systematic cause has nothing to do with "ether-wind," but has to do with differences of temperature of the air traversed by the two light bundles which produced the bands of interference. Such an effect is indeed practically inevitable if the walls of the laboratory room have a not negligible difference in temperature.
It is one of the cases where the systematic errors are increasing quickly with the dimension of the apparatus.

In Shankland's analysis, no statistically significant signal for the existence of aether was found. Shankland concluded that Miller's observed signal was partly due to error rather than an observed existence of aether holding radiant energy; Thus a large, but indefinite, number of mainstream scientists today hold the conviction that any signal that Miller observed was the result of the experimenter effect, which was a common source of systematic error before modern experimental techniques were developed (ed, Miller did publish an early textbook on experimental techniques; cf., Ginn & Company, 1903).

William Broad and Nicholas Wade, reporters who wrote Betrayers of the Truth: Fraud in Science (1983), have stated that scientists should have reviewed Miller's research more seriously at the time, in lieu of incompetence and unprofessional conduct.

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Other studies

Other studies have instead concluded that the shifts in Miller's data are statistically significant. For example, A. K. Timiriazev, R. A. Monti (Physics Essays 9, 1996) and M. Allais (Comptes Rendus de l'Academie des Sciences 327, 1999) later disproved Shankland's allegation. As of 2004, there has been more of Miller's papers from the possession of R. S. Shankland to surface and they are awaiting future analysis.

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Other endeavors

Dr. Miller published manuals designed to be student handbooks for the performance of experimental problems in physics. In 1908, Miller's interest in acoustics led him to develop a machine to record sound waves photographically, called the phonodeik. He used the machine to compare the waveforms produced by flutes crafted from different materials. During World War I, Miller worked with the physical characteristics of pressure waves of large guns at the request of the government. Dayton Miller was elected to the National Academy of Science in 1921.

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Published works

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See also

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External links and references

Main

Aether

Other endeavors






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