C
cassini
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Alec, are you mixing the A test with the M&M test?
1870-1: The Airy Failure
Boscovich’s Tiebreaker
**In 1730 Fr Boscovich suggested a logical conclusive trial that would, he expected, put the heliocentric theory on a more certain footing, a simple experiment that could, he believed, confirm or verify that it was the earth doing the moving.
To understand the experiment let us go back to the analogy of a man with an umbrella in the rain. In rain, we know that if a man moves and wants to keep dry he has to allow for his velocity and that of the rain by tilting his umbrella.
Similarly, if two men with umbrellas start to run a race, both have to tilt their umbrellas But if one man runs faster (V) than the other (v) the faster man will have to tilt his umbrella more than the slower running man.
Let us again swap a man for the earth and a telescope with an umbrella. Unlike the one man tilted umbrella analogy, which can be interpreted either geocentrically or heliocentrically, the above two-man, two-umbrella illustration can only be interpreted heliocentrically because to interpret it geocentrically the clouds would have to be travelling at two speeds which is impossible.
Fr Boscovich reasoned correctly that if one could conduct an experiment like Bradley’s stellar aberration test with two earths and two telescopes travelling at different speeds and one of them had to be tilted more than the other, this would, like the two different tilted umbrellas, prove it is the earth that moves and not the stars. So, how does one conduct an experiment that has two earths, one going faster than the other relative to the stars? Well easy, if you follow the logic. You do it with two similar telescopes but fill one with water. This slows down the starlight passing through it (13% slower). The other air-filled telescope will allow the same starlight to pass through at normal speed. By slowing the light passing through one of two similar telescopes pointed at the same star and leaving the other as normal, you in effect set up the two-speed earth scenario.
O.K., what then? Well, as the faster man would have to tilt his umbrella more than the slower man, the faster earth, the one with the air-filled telescope, would have to be tilted more than the slower earth, the water-filled telescope. If, like the men, in the experiment one telescope has to be tilted more than the other to allow for the extra speed, then we can deduct that the telescopes, like the men, must be moving, thus showing the earth moves.
According to the yarns of history, it took ‘objective scientists’ of the time 84 years after Boscovich’s death before anyone bothered to try this experiment. ( G. B. Airy: ‘On the supposed alteration of the amount of Astronomical Aberration of light, produced by the passage of light through a considerable thickness of Refracting Medium.’ Proceedings of the Royal Society, London, 1870, pp. 35-39.) They tell us that only when discoveries in electromagnetism required a logically solid demonstration of aberration, did they feel the need to do the test. The Astronomer Royal, Sir George Airy (1802-1892) took this bold step in 1871 and gave Boscovich’s experiment a try. The results showed the reason why all these ‘great’ pioneers in astronomy evaded the experiment for 100 years, although, I’ll wager, it was conducted many times in private and the results hidden by the Earthmovers to allow heliocentricism another hundred years to become entrenched into the psyche of man.
As you may have anticipated by now, the angles of both telescopes tracking starlight remained the same. This meant that if the earth moves relative to stars, then it moves at TWO speeds, which is ridiculous. The only logical, empirical, scientific interpretation of the test result then is that it is the starlight that moves, not the earth.
Here then was George Airy, in 1870-1, after a simple, logical and physically valid and decisive test that nobody can dispute, demonstrating that stellar aberration - rather than providing ‘proof’ for a moving earth, shows that the earth stands firm.
Such a logical interpretation of the Airy test was of course unacceptable to the triumphant Copernicans. Accordingly, every possible excuse as to why the Airy test gave a ‘negative’ result has been proposed. One of these excuses was that of ‘ether-drag’, a not impossible theory that moving bodies in space, in this case the earth, drag with them some invisible and static ether - if ether exists that is. Experiments done in 1818 by the French physicist Augustin Fresnel (1788-1827) suggest¬ed this might be so, but as often happens in this field of science, in 1887 an important experiment cast doubt on this possibility.**
