Recent content by Jim Fern

Remember, it also included observations of waves and their mediums other than light, i.e. stones in a pond, wind on the grass, sound through the air, etc., that also led to the hypothesis that since light observationally behaved as a wave, then it may require the same thing...a medium. They had...

I really just found an opportunity to quote Pirates of the Caribbean...and I took it! ;)

If you say so chief. But here it is again: "Contemporary applications of the Ring Laser Gyroscope (RLG) include an embedded GPS capability to further enhance accuracy of RLG Inertial Navigation Systems (INS)s on military aircraft, commercial airliners, ships and spacecraft . These hybrid...

Of course not. But nevertheless, they went about testing an assumption that came from those observations over the course of hundreds of years, which by definition IS a hypothesis lol. The M-M hypothesis went something like this: if the Earth moves around the sun at 67,000 mph, and this movement...

I hated quoting Wikipedia since it takes fun out of research, but I'm going to bed, so here it is: A ring laser gyroscope (RLG) consists of a ring laser having two independent counter-propagating resonant modes over the same path; the difference in the frequencies is used to detect rotation. It...

Hmm. Key takeaways. Institutions of learning: "Keep to the code." @robphy: "The code is more what you call 'guidelines' than actual rules."

A ring laser gyroscope IS an interferometer, since it employs interference of counter-propagating beams of light. Also according to GPS Engineer Neil Ashby: One of the most confusing relativistic effects – the Sagnac effect – appears in rotating reference frames. The Sagnac effect is the...

It was based on their observations of the sun and other celestial bodies in relation to the earth...of course there were observations. They were testing a hypothesis (step 2) based on those observations, such as the wave behavior of light the and the notion of the Earth going round the sun. They...

Just look up the scientific method anywhere you see fit. Observations come first. Always have.

The first step in the Scientific Method is to make objective observations. These observations are based on specific events that have already happened and can be verified by others as true or false. Step 2. Form a hypothesis. Step 3. Make a prediction. Step 4. Perform an experiment. Step 5...

Thank you all for this information and answering my questions, regardless of how idiotic some of them seemed, to be sure. You've certainly given me a great deal of things to look into. :)

And yet the original transform for length contraction was invented and applied, what was it, maybe two years after the 1887 experiment had been conducted, and thus about eight years after the first, since Fitzgerald had tried to get one of his pupils, W. Preston, to publish its earliest form in...

Doesn't the scientific method require that observations precede experiment? Otherwise, how would one know how to set up the experiment in the first place? In this desired scenario, relativity and LT would be hypotheses to be experimented with based on observations that led to those hypotheses...

Nope, but convention would hold that it would have to be a significant fraction of the speed of light LOL, something you really couldn't achieve with the mass of a steel rod in the first place, no matter how tiny you can make it. Good point. However, if that is indeed the case, then how was the...

You're confused? I've been confused the whole time LOL, and I find it most difficult to find a straight answer. The classic example - the most widely known - is the M-M experiment of 1881, which preceded both Relativity and the Lorentz Transform, which came about, especially the LT, as a...