Nugget salvaged from among much misinformation
key words 1986 August  Nature Magazine Special Relativity E W Silvertooth vol 322 page 590 Michelson Morley

Do recall the Michelson Morely experiment apparent failure in 1887 paved the way to stampede science groupthink into the arms of Einstein's Relativity, that specifically needed the ether not to exist, when it was first proposed in 1905. Practically proclaimed a messiah Einstein was unable to convince the jubilant converts in the 1920s that the ether did exist after all and needed to be reintroduced to make relativity work. NO roared the scientific crowd. We now fast forward 100 yrs to 1986.

This commentary is penned by a maverick scientist Rochus Boerner  who was ostracised by peer review journals.
Silvertooth's Experiment
In a 1986 letter to Nature[ 42 ] Ernest W. Silvertooth reported that he constructed an interferometer capable of detecting the absolute motion of the Earth with respect to the ether. In Experimental detection of the ether[ 43 ] and Motion through the Ether[ 44 ], Silvertooth reported that on the particular day of his measurements, the Earth moved at 378 km/s towards the constellation Leo. If relativity is correct, than this result should be complete garbage.
Silvertooth published his findings before NASA launched COBE, the first satellite to accurately measure the cosmic microwave background (CMB). Due to Doppler shift, there is a slight anisotropy in the spectrum of the CMB. Based on precise measurements of this anisotropy, it was determined that, relative to the CMB, the heliocentric frame moves at 390 km/s towards Leo. Given the earth's orbital speed of 30 km/s, this is a very good agreement with Silvertooth's measurement. In a refined experiment[ 45 ], Silvertooth and Whitney confirmed the earlier result and found a speed of v = 378 km/s.
A citation search through ISI Web of Science[ 47 ] reveals no references to any of Silvertooth's papers in the mainstream scientific literature. An online document[ 46 ] briefly mentions and dismisses it on the grounds that both the experiment and the theoretical analysis are flawed, but given how well Silvertooth's result agrees with the independently determined motion of the Earth through the CMB, error seems to be an insufficient explanation. Unless Silvertooth committed outright fraud by simply making a lucky guess as to the Earth's velocity relative to the CMB and then ascribing this guess to an imaginary experiment, the inescapable conclusion would be that translation can be measured by purely electromagnetic means and that Einstein's theory of special relativity is falsified.
? Rochus Boerner 2003 This article may be freely distributed as long as it is unchanged and this notice remains.
http://www.world-mysteries.com/sci_supr.htm

Reasons to doubt the validity of Relativity Theory
Einstein's special theory of relativity, published in 1905, is one of the foundational theories of modern physics. It states that the vacuum speed of light is the same for all observers in initial (non-accelerated) reference frames, and that time and space coordinates combine in a peculiar way when measured from different inertial systems. Exactly how this happens is described by a set of equations called the Lorentz Transformation.
Strictly speaking, special relativity theory does not apply to anything in the physical universe, since gravitational fields, however minute, are always present. It took Einstein about 10 years to incorporate gravity and acceleration into his theory, and the result is known as general relativity. It describes gravity not as a force, but as curvature of spacetime caused by mass. According to general relativity, there can be no such thing as a gravity shield.
Despite the consensus of a majority of physicists that special relativity is proven beyond a shadow of a doubt, there is a well-reasoned experimental and theoretical case against its validity. But relativity dissidents are routinely censored from presenting their ideas at conferences or having them published in the scientific literature. John E. Chappell, Jr., the late director of the Natural Philosophy Alliance (an organization of relativity critics), relates the following suppression experience:
"There has been a particularly vicious attitude towards critics of Einsteinian relativity at U.C. Berkeley ever since. I ran into it in 1985, when I read a paper arguing for absolute simultaneity at that year's International Congress on the History of Science. After I finished, the Danish chairman made some courteous remarks about dissidents he had learned about in Scandinavia, and then turned to the audience for questions. The first speaker was one of a group of about 4 young physics students in the back. He launched immediately into a horrible tirade of verbal abuse, accusing me of being entirely wrong in my analysis, a simplification of the Melbourne Evans analysis-'Evans is wrong; you are wrong,' he shouted. He accused me of being way out of line to present my 'faulty' arguments on his prestigious campus. When I started to ask him 'Then how would you explain...', he loudly interrupted me with 'I don't have to explain anything.' The rest of the audience felt so disturbed by all this, that the question session was essentially destroyed."[
23 ]
Such reactions are not uncommon. To even begin to criticize Einsteins's theory of special relativity has become a scientific heresy of the highest order. The prevailing attitude of the physical establishment is that anyone who doubts the validity of this "bedrock of modern physics" is insane, and that trying to refute it is a symptom of "psychosis"[
24 ].
Caltech Professor David L. Goodstein states in a video-tape lecture
"There are theories in science, which are so well verified by experience that they become promoted to the status of fact. One example is the Special Theory of Relativity-it's still called a theory for historical reasons, but it is in reality a simple, engineering fact, routinely used in the design of giant machines, like nuclear particle accelerators, which always work perfectly. Another example of that sort of thing is the theory of evolution. These are called theories, but they are in reality among the best established facts in all of human knowledge."[
25 ]
Isaac Asimov has stated that "no physicist who is even marginally sane doubts the validity of SR."[
26 ]
An article on relativity dissidents[
28 ] quotes relativist Clifford Will of Washington University expressing a similar sentiment:
"SR has been confirmed by experiment so many times that it borders on crackpot to say there is something wrong with it. Experiments have been done to test SR explicitly. The world's particle accelerators would not work if SR wasn't in effect. The global positioning system would not work if special relativity didn't work the way we thought it did."
Unfortunately for the progress of physics, when opinions like these reach a critical mass, they become self-fulfilling prophecies. Dissent is no longer respected, or even tolerated. Evidence to the contrary can no longer be communicated, for the journals will refuse to publish it[
24 ]. Mathematically and logically, the notion that a theory that has made many correct predictions must necessarily be true is untenable. Scientific models can produce arbitrarily many, arbitrarily good predictions and still be flawed, as the historical example of the Ptolemaic (geocentric) model of the solar system shows. It does not matter how many observations are consistent with a theory if there is only one observation that is not. Ironically, relativity itself should have driven this point home to physicists long ago.
For centuries, Newtonian physics had led science to one triumph after another in explaining the inner workings of the natural world, and at the end of the 19th century, no physicist who was "even marginally sane" doubted its validity. After all, hadn't the validity of Newtonian physics "been confirmed by experiment so many times" that it would have "bordered on crackpot to say there is something wrong with it"? Didn't the operation of the world's steam engines prove the validity of Newtonian physics? And yet, Newtonian physics loses its validity at speeds approaching the speed of light. In hindsight, it is obvious why the discrepancy was never caught. Due to the enormity of the speed of light c, effects of the order of (v/c) only manifest themselves in highly sophisticated experiments. Similarly, even modern technology cannot easily distinguish between relativity and competing theories that agree with relativity at first order of (v/c) but disagree at higher order. One such competing theory is Ronald Hatch's Modified Lorentz Ether Theory[
27 ]
Hatch, a former president of the Institute of Navigation and current Director of Navigation Systems Engineering of NavCom Technologies, is one of the world's foremost experts on the GPS. Concerning the question of whether the operation of the GPS proves the validity of SR, he has come to conclusions diametrically opposite from Clifford Will's. In Relativity and GPS[
29 , 30 ], he argues that the observed effect of velocity on the GPS clocks flat out contradicts the predictions of special relativity.
Hatch's proposed alternative to special and general relativity theory, Modified Lorentz Ether Gauge Theory (MLET), agrees with General Relativity at first order but corrects many astronomical anomalies that GRT cannot account for without ad-hoc assumptions, such as the anomalous rotation of galaxies and certain anomalies in planetary orbits. In addition, the force of gravity is self-limiting in MLET, which eliminates point singularities (black holes), one of the major shortcomings of GRT. One of the testable predictions of Hatch's theory is that LIGO, the Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory, will fail to detect any sign of gravity waves.
A suppression story surrounding the historical roots of relativity.
Relativity textbooks all contain the story of how the Michelson-Morley experiment[
31 ] supposedly proved the non-existence of a light-carrying medium, the ether. In this experiment, light rays are sent on round trips in different directions and then reunited, resulting in an interference pattern. If an ether "wind" caused the speed of light to be direction-dependent, then rotation of the experimental apparatus would result in a shift of this pattern. But such a shift was never detected, proving the isotropy (direction-independence) of the speed of light, or so the story goes.
But physical reality is more complicated then the foundational myth of relativity would have us believe. An examination of historical papers on the subject indicates that relativists have rewritten history. The M-M experiment of 1887 found only a fraction of the effect size predicted by the stationary ether hypothesis, thus clearly disproving it, but the effect was emphatically not "null" within the accuracy of the experiment.
Dayton C. Miller reviews the evidence in The Ether-Drift Experiments and the Determination of the Absolute Motion of the Earth [
32 ] and concludes that
"The brief series of observations was sufficient to show that the effect did not have the anticipated magnitude. However, and this fact must be emphasized, the indicated effect was not zero; the sensitivity of the apparatus was such that the conclusion, published in 1887, stated that the observed relative motion of the earth and ether did not exceed one-fourth of the Earth's orbital velocity. This is quite different from a null effect now so frequently imputed to this experiment by the writers on Relativity."
Miller then discusses the original M-M data and shows that there is a systematic effect indicating a speed of the Earth relative to the Ether of 8.8 km/s for the noon observations and 8.0 km/s for the evening observations.
Relativity skeptics like Miller believed that the ether may be entrained ("dragged along") by the earth. To test that hypothesis, Miller endeavored to replicate the M-M experiment (which had been performed in a basement in Cleveland) at greater altitude on Mount Wilson, where presumably there would be a stronger ether drift.
After years of careful experimentation, Miller indeed found a systematic deviation from the null result predicted by SR which greatly embarrassed Einstein and his followers. Einstein tried to explain it away as an artifact of temperature variation, but Miller had taken great care to avoid precisely that kind of error. Miller told the Cleveland Plain Dealer on January 27, 1926,
"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."
But the tide of scientific opinion had turned against the ether and in favor of Einstein. The 1919 solar eclipse observations led by Sir Arthur Eddington that allegedly confirmed general relativity's prediction of the deflection of starlight by a gravitational field was so ambivalent and poorly performed that it was scientifically worthless[
33 ], but thanks to Eddington's authority, it was accepted as a resounding confirmation. Some of the stars had moved in the direction predicted by Einstein, but not as much, or too much, others had even moved in the opposite direction. Confirmation was obtained by the "scientific" device of discarding the data that didn't fit the prediction, and retaining the data that did. The "confirmation" was triumphantly announced by Eddington at a joint meeting of the Royal Society and the Royal Astronomical Society to an audience that had not actually seen the data first hand. In the judgement of an eye witness, the meeting resembled a coronation ceremony rather than a scientific conference.[ 34 ]
Because of this scientific fraud, Einstein became a world celebrity overnight, surrounded by an aura of scientific infallibility. Miller's results, which suggested that in order to detect anisotropies in the speed of light, the interferometer needed to be surrounded by as little matter as possible, and located at a high altitude, were ignored in subsequent tests of the isotropy of the speed of light, such as the Brillet-Hall experiment[
35 ], and recently, the M?experiment[ 36 ].
After Miller's death, one of his students, Robert S. Shankland, gave the physics establishment the final excuse it needed to forget Miller's work for good[
37 ]. Shankland simply revived the old criticism of temperature variations, against which Miller had always successfully defended himself during his lifetime, to reach the conclusion that Miller's results must be invalid. Some relativity skeptics believe that that conclusion was preordained by Shankland's manifest devotion to Einstein which is evident in his writing[ 38 , 39 ].
One of these, James DeMeo, Ph.D., has undertaken a detailed review of Miller's work and Shankland's critique[
40 ] that comes to the conclusion that the Shankland team
"with some degree of consultation with Einstein, decided that 'Miller must be wrong' and then set about to see what they could find in his archive that would support that conclusion."
It must be noted, however, that Miller's determination of the velocity of the Earth relative to the ether is incompatible with modern observations. Miller found that the solar system is moving at a speed of 208 kilometers per second towards a point in the Great Magellanic Cloud in the constellation Doradus, in contradiction to modern measurements discussed below.
Even if the alleged null result of the M-M experiment is accepted, the isotropy of the speed of light does not necessarily follow. M. Psimopoulos and T. Theocharis, two physicists at Imperial College, London, point out in a letter to Nature[
41 ] that the M-M experiment has only been performed in terrestrial laboratories, where the gravitational field and the magnetosphere of the Earth and other ambient factors are always present, and must therefore be repeated in space before its conclusions can be accepted as universal. They note that
"all sorts of experiments have already been conducted in space. But the few experiments which might have truly tested the perhaps most fundamental and controversial hypotheses in twentieth century physics- Einstein's postulates - have curiously not been done."
? Rochus Boerner 2003 This article may be freely distributed as long as it is unchanged and this notice remains.
http://www.world-mysteries.com/sci_supr.htm

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Is the Speed of Light in Interplanetary Space a Constant?
The late physicist Bryan G. Wallace discovered in 1961 that radar distance measurements of the surface of the planet Venus did not confirm the constancy of the speed of light. There were systematic variations in the radar data containing diurnal, lunar and synodic components. Attempting to get his results published in Physical Review Letters, he encountered great resistance from referees, and eventually settled for a lesser journal[ 48 ].
In a letter to Physics Today[ 49 ] Wallace summarizes his findings as follows:
"The 1961 interplanetary radar contact with Venus presented the first opportunity to overcome technological limitations and perform direct experiments of Einstein's second postulate of a constant light speed of c in space. When the radar calculations were based on the postulate, the observed-computed residuals ranged to over 3 milliseconds of the expected error of 10 microseconds from the best [general relativity] fit the Lincoln Lab could generate, a variation range of over 30,000%. An analysis of the data showed a component that was relativistic in a c+v Galilean sense. "
Let's do a quick reality check here. If the speed of light in interplanetary space is non constant, how could NASA not have noticed in its robotic exploration of the solar system? Wallace makes the scandalous claim that NASA has noticed, and has been using equations with non-relativistic components to calculate signal transit times in the solar system all along:
"At the December 1974 AAS Dynamical Astronomy Meeting, E. M. Standish Jr of JPL reported that significant unexplained systematic variations existed in all the interplanetary data, and that they are forced to use empirical correction factors that have no theoretical foundation."[ 50 ]
In a 1973 paper[ 51 ], Wallace describes how the Lincoln Lab introduced averaging to suppress the anomalous radar results and refused to release the raw data to him, stonewalling his investigation.
"The apparent improvement in the residuals for later years was due to the fact that the Lab interpolated the 1964 [Venus] data to 12:00 UT and the 1967 data to one observation a day from 2:12 UT to 2:21 UT. The observing time for the 1961 data ranged from 00:33 UT to 23:40 UT. The involved radar astronomers are publicly claiming nearly complete agreement between their recent radar analysis and general relativity, but my investigation reveals otherwise. At the Fourth Texas Symposium of Relativistic Astrophysics, I.I. Shapiro of the Lincoln Lab promised to send me any data I wanted. I read in an article published by the lab that they had data for the same observing dates covering a wide range of daily observing times from both the MIT and USSR radar stations. I wrote Shapiro requesting this data 2/13/69; his letters of 2/28/69 and 3/12/69 ignored my request. I made an issue of this in my letter to him of 3/20/69, and in his reply of 3/27/69 he stated, 'Unfortunately the data do not exist in the form in which you wanted them and hence, I cannot honor your request.'
Shapiro later sent me data that were completely worthless for making an objective test of the relative velocity of light in space. The data were from two MIT radar stations in Massachusetts. The separation between them was only 0.2' of longitude and 20.6" of latitude and the observations had been interpolated to 2:12 UT to 2:21 UT with only one observation per day. It seems obvious that the Lab eliminated the variations by interpolating the data for each day to the one observing time for that day that agreed with the general relativity prediction. One could use the same method to prove that a stopped clock keeps perfect time."
A subsequent letter submitted to Physics Today on July 9, 1984 was denied publication. Wallace reproduced this letter in the chapter Publication Politics of his online book The Farce of Physics[ 52 ]. In it, he wrote
"The speed of light is c+v
During a current literature search, I requested and received a reprint of a paper [T. D. Moyer, Celes. Mech., 23, 33(1981)] published by Theodore D. Moyer of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. The paper reports the methods used to obtain accurate values of range observables for radio and radar signals in the solar system. The paper's (A6) equation and the accompanying information that calls for evaluating the position vectors at the signal reception time is nearly equivalent to the Galilean c+v equation (2) in my paper RADAR TESTING OF THE RELATIVE VELOCITY OF LIGHT IN SPACE. [B. G. Wallace, Spectros. Lett., 2, 361(1969)] The additional terms in the (A6) equation correct for the effects of the troposphere and charged particles, as well as the general relativity effects of gravity and velocity time dilation.
The fact that the radio astronomers have been reluctant to acknowledge the full theoretical implications of their work is probably related to the unfortunate things that tend to happen to physicists that are rash enough to challenge Einstein's sacred second postulate. Over twenty-three years have gone by since the original Venus radar experiments clearly showed that the speed of light in space was not constant, and still the average scientist is not aware of this fact! This demonstrates why it is important for the APS to bring true scientific freedom to the PR journal's editorial policy."
Supporting evidence comes from Ronald Hatch who finds that the NASA equations for interplanetary navigation follow his MLET theory rather than special relativity:
"The experimental evidence is almost overwhelming in support of the MLET view. There is a large disjoint between the SRT theorists and the experimentalists. The SRT theorists continue to claim that the speed of light is automatically the velocity c and isotropic with respect to the moving observer or experiment. But the SRT experimentalists do what is necessary to explain and make sense of the measurements. The equations for tracking and navigating the interplanetary probes developed by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory(JPL) for NASA clearly follow the MLET template."[ 27 ]
Mr. Wallace died on April 19, 1997, his findings ignored and thus neither confirmed nor refuted by the physics establishment. The question remains: Is the speed of light in interplanetary space subject to systematic variations in time?
It is therefore imperative that systematic, high precision speed of light experiments be performed in earth orbit and interplanetary space. No such experiments have been carried out yet - why test a theory that you already know is correct? - but majority opinion has been changing lately. Attempts to reconcile general relativity with quantum theory have been a notable failure, and physicists have come to suspect that a unified field theory must involve "small" violations of special and general relativity. M?et al. state
"Special relativity (SR) underlies all accepted theories of nature at the fundamental level. Therefore, it has been and must be tested with ever increasing precision to provide a firm basis for its future application. Such tests are also motivated by the efforts to unify gravity with the other forces of nature, one of the outstanding open challenges in modern science. In fact, many currently discussed models of quantum gravity do violate the principles of SR."[ 36 ]
This has finally created a renewed interest in testing both relativity theories experimentally to high precision. German physicists are currently designing the OPTIS mission[ 53 ], a satellite carrying ultra-high precision experiments to test key assumptions and predictions of relativity; among them, the isotropy and constancy of the speed of light. As expected, the OPTIS mission objective is to confirm special and general relativity, or at most to find weak violations:
"New unifying theories (e.g. the String-Theory) predict small deviations from the Special and General Relativity. If such deviations could be found (e.g. an unisotropy of the speed of light) the way to a new understanding of the time and space structure of the universe would be open."[ 54 ]
The motivation to conduct such experiments in Earth orbit is solely due to technological considerations and has nothing to do with the dissident argument that space-based tests of special relativity might produce radically different results than ground-based ones. But if Miller and other relativity critics are right, OPTIS may find much more than small deviations. The mission is still in the planning stages and no launch date has been set, but results could be available between 2005 and 2007.
? Rochus Boerner 2003 This article may be freely distributed as long as it is unchanged and this notice remains.
http://www.world-mysteries.com/sci_supr.htm

Suppression of Science

While identifying Gregg Bradens misinformation content I was happy to find that sometimes he gets it right. 
In particular the above announcement, heavily emphasised by Braden, genuine reference to hard proof of the existence of the ether in 1986. Its real by modern scientific standard. At least this time, Braden's evangelical presentation style is justified. Posing the very relevant question why don't we all know about this? Why didn't science magazines proclaim this  wonderful discovery?
Because as he rightly explains there are entire cultures built on the non existence of the ether. The Einstein Relativity culture. What actually happened was the opposite. The scientist E W Silvertooth was ostracised by the relativity culture. Its described here by another ostracised scientist Rochus Boerner  who supplies a few examples of counter culture discoveries being buried, actively suppressed.
His full essay here includes the scandal of Cold Fusion