For almost a year now, I have been in the uncomfortable position of having an idea.
However, there is one nice thing about this idea. It makes a concrete, exact and relatively easy to test physical prediction.
The idea predicts that there is a 11,187 m/s (Earth’s escape velocity) aethereal wind directly into the surface of the Earth at its surface.
I believe it would be possible to test this by performing a vertical variation of modern versions of the Michelson-Morley experiment (MMX) with one arm pointed in the vertical direction. (Modern MMX)
In 2003, Müller et al. performed a normal (2 horizontal orthogonal arms) modern MMX using cryogenic optical resonators that found a “possible anisotropy of the speed of light c, (of) 2.6 +/- 1.7 parts in 10^15” ( arXiv )
In a brief conversation with Holger Müller a Professor at Berkeley and the lead author of that paper, he stated that to this knowledge no one had ever performed a variation of the experiment using a vertical arm. He also mentioned that such an experiment would be complicated by the fact that gravity would slightly compress the length of the vertical bar making two equal length bars no longer equal in length.
“They haven't been done as far as i know. The problem is that any interesting physics signal would be hard to tell from a large signal from stretching of the arms under their own weight.” - H. Müller
I am interested in attempting to run this experiment myself. To that end, I have the following questions:
- Given current Physics understanding, is there any reason to expect that such a vertical variation of the MMX wouldn’t return the exact same results as all other MMXs, namely that there is no anisotropy in the speed of light?
- Given the complications mentioned by Professor Müller, are there reasonable methods available to overcome them? Especially considering the size of the effect (c + 11,187m/s vs c) is substantially larger than the accuracy obtained in his and similar modern MMXs.
- What is the order of magnitude cost of such an experiment? If I am to fund this personally, would such a project cost \$10,000? \$100,000? \$1,000,000? more?
Any insight offered on this topic will be greatly appreciated.
EDIT: For what its worth, for people looking at this years later. As I originally alluded to in a comment to [WetSavannaAnimal aka Rod Vance]'s much appreciated and comprehensive answer. While, I've become increasingly comfortable with the idea that there is a flow of aether or spacetime or whatever you want to call it into the Earth at 11km/s; I strongly believe that a vertical MMX would return the same null result as the horizontal one.
And I believe it will do so because of length contraction; that length contraction exactly masks any anisotropy of the speed of light by ensuring that the roundtrip time of light in any direction is a constant; that length contraction ensures Lorentz co-variance.