Reproducing the Velador Experiment

Because Osadchey’s result is not yet confirmed or adequately integrated into current theory, any speculation as to its cause should be regarded as one step removed from fiction until proved otherwise.

That said, I'm going to give in to temptation and speculate till my heart's content.  Today's wild-ass guess goes something like this:

Osadchey’s results raise the possibility that Dayton Miller’s aether detection experiments of the 1910’s and 1920’s detected the same phenomenon.  If true, Osadchey’s results strongly suggest that Miller’s experiments failed to detect linear motion through a luminiferous aether.  The shift that Miller detected corresponds to an invariant directional vector that is independent of the not inconsiderable velocity of Earth’s rotation and orbital motion.  Most luminiferous aether theories existing prior to Miller’s work predict a measurable effect directly related to Earth’s revolution around the sun, but variation in the measured displacement appears absent in both Miller’s and Osadchey’s results.  Miller invented the theoretical notion of “partially entrained aether” to explain his observations, but this is inconsistent with previously presented theoretical models of luminiferous aether, and is equivalent to positing the “special magic aether” to explain a result at odds with the then expected behavior of a luminiferous aether in an absolute reference frame.  Although he may be credited for the first successful detection, Miller’s hypothesis is clearly incorrect.

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 (Again, saying that Miller misinterpreted his results is not the same as saying he detected nothing.  Claims that later experiments "with increased precision" have shown that Dayton Miller detected nothing are  misleading, too.  Miller's experiment was up against a theoretical limit to the type of instrumentation he was using.  Exceeding the precision of the Miller experiment with a Michaelson interferometer was a physical impossibility until the recent advent of CCD instrumentation and computer controls, and even now the improvement possible is not very great.  Higher precision experiments to test various ether-theory hypotheses do exist, but were performed with different types of instruments, were performed with dramatically different ranges and time scales, and were performed to test hypotheses other than Miller's assertion of absolute motion toward the eccliptic pole.  It is entirely possible that the effect was missed by what was, by then, a rapidly shrinking population of serious experimentalists looking to confirm absolute motion in the face of a growing body of contrary evidence.  Miller's experiment, with daily monitoring for a complete siderial year at several different latitudes, was never repeated by an independent researcher.) 

Osadchey’s result is, however, consistent with angular momentum and associated virtual accelerations.  Light is known to possess angular momentum, and could be affected by an angular momentum component in the local gravitational tensor.  If both confirmed and invariant, the effect is more likely to be due to an angular momentum component in the local gravitational tensor than due to a linear motion of the measured reference frame.  (To justify any dependence on linear motion, with or without an absolute reference frame, one would need to first explain why both Osadchey’s and Miller’s results appear independent of the theoretically much greater circular velocity of the Earth.)  Frame dragging due to the Sun (the largest gravitational component due to angular momentum with a source in the Earth’s near vicinity) is not of sufficient magnitude to explain the measured effect, and is exerted along a different vector from that observed.  The observed component is due to the angular momentum of neither the Earth nor the Sun. This raises the possibility that such a angular momentum field would be universal, and that assumption raises the possibility that the angular momentum term of the cosmological constant is non-negligible. 

This chain of assumptions can be tested against current theory.

A angular momentum field component of any origin would affect signal transmission for deep space craft, and might provide an explanation for the apparent orbital discrepancies observed for the Pioneer X spacecraft.  If detected locally, experimental verification of an angular momentum field could be begun by accurately predicting the discrepancy in the Pioneer X probe’s apparent position using the measured data.

Observation of circular accelerations as small as that due to terrestrial rotation (less than 3.4 cm/s², corresponding to a circular velocity of less than 464 m/s with the radius of the Earth) is possible employing the Sagnac Effect in laser ring interferometers (e.g., laser gyroscopes).  The inability of these gyroscopes to detect the effect identified by Osadchey will need to be explained if the experimental results are confirmed.  The expected virtual acceleration due to Osadchey’s effect will need to be assessed, and may prove to be an observed effect inconsistent with the hypothesis that the phenomenon detected by Osadchey is due to angular momentum (unless of course, one invokes the “special magic angular momentum”), excluding that as a working theory. 

Predicting these two observations would be important tests of any explanations related to an angular momentum field component.

Of course, as of this time, I should note that actually reproducing Osadchey's result in the first place would be a nice test, too.  More on that later...