Jed Rothwell wrote: > thomas malloy wrote: > >> Harold Aspden showed that a gyroscope composed of a magnet, when spun >> up, and then stopped, it can be returned to it's previous motion with >> way less energy than was required to set it in motion the first time. >> This is the Aspden Effect. > > Harold Aspden is an astounding person who does elegant experiments and > writes good papers. More attention should be paid to him. His web site > is here, for those unfamiliar with his work: > > http://www.energyscience.org.uk/
It appears to be rather large. He appears to "believe in" an aether. Jed (or anyone), do you know of anyplace on his site where he explains how he resolves his aether theory with the results of the Michelson-Morley and Sagnac experiments? I did not see such a discussion in a quick perusal. If he assumes an aether, but doesn't discuss those two experiments, it's going to be a little difficult to take the rest of what he says terribly seriously. Of course, you can never prove a theory, but you sure can disprove one, and most aether theories fail in the face of the null MMX result and the non-null Sagnac result. (Claiming the MMX result "wasn't really null" is not a reasonable option, it's been repeated a zillion times, it's been back-analyzed to death, and if it got a positive signal it was certainly not far enough above the noise floor to allow classical aether theories to wiggle past. What's more it was done by observers who started out biased in favor of a *positive* result, so "lying experimenter covering up the results" doesn't work, either.) Lorentz's (final) aether theory flies neatly between those results but it has the drawback of making exactly the same predictions as special relativity, so there's no particular reason to use it in place of relativity. Unless Aspden has found a new way to model an aether (different from that discovered by Lorentz), such that it fits with experimental results *and* produces predictions which differ from SR in some way, well, it's hard to see much value in it. Sorry, Jed, if I sound "dismissing", I know you said you like his experimental results.
