Dear Philip, Check out this website which will give you a great deal of information, photos and diagrams about the accuracy of interferometer experiments. www.orgonelab.org/miller.htm Jack ----- Original Message ----- From: philip madsen To: geocentrism list Sent: Saturday, July 07, 2007 9:46 PM Subject: [geocentrism] Michelson Interferometer Interferometer Well I did not exactly know what it did, maybe some others were not clear so I posted it here.. Actually in this set up (which they do not explain too well using terms like interference which is really a matter of in or out of phase waves,) and really , "distructive interference" is simply out of phase waves. One more piece of the puzzle I need. Perhaps Neville or Robert, please, What is the mechanism used, whereby one would expect an "aether medium", to affect the phase of the light beam by its movement lets say from left to right in this illustration. It might help as well to please tell us how thes mirrors could be placed with such precision in space within the resolution of such a short wavelengths such as is the light spectrum, to be able to measure even parts of such wavelengths. Thanks, And whilst we are of the experimental mind, could we not use Radar over a greater distance (than the interferometer) for better resolution? Philip. Michelson Interferometer Main article: Michelson interferometer A Michelson interferometer. A very common example of an interferometer is the Michelson (or Michelson-Morley) type. Here the basic building blocks are a monochromatic source (emitting light or matter waves), a detector, two mirrors and one semitransparent mirror (often called beam splitter). These are put together as shown in the figure. There are two paths from the (light) source to the detector. One reflects off the semi-transparent mirror, goes to the top mirror and then reflects back, goes through the semi-transparent mirror, to the detector. The other one goes through the semi-transparent mirror, to the mirror on the right, reflects back to the semi-transparent mirror, then reflects from the semi-transparent mirror into the detector. If these two paths differ by a whole number (including 0) of wavelengths, there is constructive interference and a strong signal at the detector. If they differ by a whole number and a half wavelengths (e.g., 0.5, 1.5, 2.5 ...) there is destructive interference and a weak signal. This might appear at first sight to violate conservation of energy. However energy is conserved, because there is a re-distribution of energy at the detector in which the energy at the destructive sites are re-distributed to the constructive sites. The effect of the interference is to alter the share of the reflected light which heads for the detector and the remainder which heads back in the direction of the source. The interferometer setup shown to the right was used in the famous Michelson-Morley experiment that provided evidence for special relativity. In Michelson's day, the interference pattern was obtained by using a gas discharge lamp, a filter, and a thin slot or pinhole. In one version of the Michelson-Morley experiment, they even ran the interferometer off starlight. Starlight is temporally incoherent light, but since for small instruments it can be considered as a point source of light it is spatially coherent and will produce an interference pattern. The Michelson interferometer finds use not only in these experiments but also for other purposes, e.g., in astronomical interferometers (see astronomical section below) and gravitational wave detectors.