M. Consoli, A. Pluchino, A. Rapisarda, S. Tudisco
Ether-drift experiments are the only known experiments which, in principle, can distinguish Einstein's interpretation of the relativistic effects from the Lorentzian point of view with some underlying form of ether which plays the role of a preferred reference frame. To test experimentally this latter point of view, it is usually assumed that the macroscopic Earth's motion should be detectable in the laboratory from the time dependence of the data. Therefore any observed stochastic signal, which does not exhibit the smooth modulations expected from the Earth's rotation, tends to be considered as a spurious instrumental effect, e.g. thermal noise. The real situation, however, might be more subtle if the hypothetical ether (i.e. the physical vacuum) resembles a turbulent fluid where large-scale and small-scale motions are only indirectly related. In this case in fact, besides thermal noise, the data might contain a genuine physical stochastic component. To test this scenario, we have performed a numerical simulation to estimate the signal in a toy model of a statistically isotropic and homogeneous turbulent flow. After subtracting the known forms of disturbances, the present data are consistent with velocity fluctuations whose absolute scale is determined by the Earth's cosmic motion with respect to the CMB (projected in the plane of the interferometer at the latitude of the laboratory). Therefore the Earth's motion, although undetectable from the naive time-dependence of the data, could nevertheless show up in their statistical distributions. In particular, the predicted non-gaussian nature of the distribution of the instantaneous data will be precisely tested with the forthcoming generation of precise cryogenic experiments, with potentially important implications for our understanding of both gravity and relativity.
View original:
http://arxiv.org/abs/1204.6157
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