Miller, Rev. Mod. Phys. 5 (1933), pg 203.
This is a laborious repetition of the Michelson-Morley experiment (MMX), with observations taken over a decade. He reports a net æther drift of about 10 km/s, and describes the variation in velocity and direction in terms of the motions of the sun and the Earth combined with a net æther drift.
This experiment was re-analyzed in: R.S. Shankland, S.W. McCuskey, F.C. Leone and G. Kuerti, “New Analysis of the Interferometric Observations of Dayton C. Miller”, Rev. Mod. Phys. 27 pg 167–178 (1955). They re-examined Miller's original data logs and explained his non-null result as partly due to statistical fluctuations and partly due to local temperature conditions. Their re-analysis is consistent with a null result at all epochs during a year. They gave no justification for any correlation with sidereal time such as Miller reported.
Remarkably, the raw data of this experiment have survived (copies can be ordered from the C.W.R.U. archives). They were also re-analyzed in: T.J. Roberts, “An Explanation of Dayton Miller's Anomalous 'Ether Drift' Result”,
arXiv
hysics/0608238. This paper explains in detail how and why Miller was fooled (using digital signal processing techniques), and performs an error analysis showing his results are not statistically significant. It also presents a new analysis that models his systematic drift and obtains a zero result with an upper bound on “æther drift” of 6 km/s (90% confidence). In short, this is every experimenter's nightmare: Miller was unknowingly looking at statistically insignificant patterns in his systematic drift that precisely mimicked the appearance of a real signal. While Miller himself could not have known this, there is no reason to believe or accept his anomalous result today.
There are dozens of other papers that discuss and/or attempt to “re-analyze” Miller's data, all of which claim to find some real signal in his data. They are all worthless as they do not perform the elementary error analysis of his raw data (see Section II of
arXivhysics/0608238). Miller's anomalous result comes from averaging data—the elementary error analysis is indisputable and shows that his result is not statistically significant. Some modern authors even perform a complicated statistical analysis on plots of his run results vs. sidereal time, proclaiming there is a “significant signal”—they forgot to look at the raw data and compute the statistical significance of each run's result: those are not significant, which destroys their house of cards.
There is also an aspect of experimenter's bias in Miller's original result (and in the modern “re-interpretations” that find a “signal”). He clearly over-averaged his data, and the “signal” he (and others) found is an order of magnitude smaller than the resolution with which his raw data points were recorded. It is a fact of arithmetic that when averaging data one will obtain an answer, but an error analysis is required to determine whether or not it is statistically significant. People unfamiliar with modern experimental physics can impose their personal desires onto Miller's plots and find a “signal” by ignoring the huge scatter of the individual runs and just looking at the averages. The quantitative error analysis shows this approach is woefully inadequate and the “signal” found this way is not significant.
I repeat: there is no reason to believe or accept Miller's anomalous result today.
