Reproducing the Velador Experiment

Speculations for Phase 2

(Last updated 7/15/07) 

I still have no real idea about the cause of what I’m observing.  Please see the page for speculations at the beginning of phase one for a disclaimer regarding the reliability of uninformed wild ass guesses.

Phase 1 was a success in that it detected the effect reported by Dr. Osadchey while failing to provide evidence of an experimental artifact that could explain the observed result.  I have published the results in the July issue of the Citizen Scientist e-zine.  It demonstrated time dependence of the phenomenon (the amplitude varies over the course of a day), which means that thermal effects can’t be eliminated from consideration as a possible cause, but demonstrated that the measured amplitude is independent of the measurement interval. 

In other words, the result is the same whether one allows the apparatus to soak up heat for five seconds, or a full minute.  The daily variation appears linked to either diurnal or sidereal time.  Lance Osadchey has also reported a variation with elevation of the laser beam path, and I have observed strong evidence of a variation with latitude.

Phase one has also yielded a rough working model.  I believe that the measured deflection vector is proportional to the vector product of the laser orientation vector and some ambient vector field.

This creates a deflection whose only component is perpendicular to the laser orientation.  This model attempts to explain how this effect might have been missed by both Michaelson interferometers and ring interferometers.  Interferometers respond best to changes with a component parallel to the light path, and are relatively insensitive to lateral motions.  An interferometer whose light path was folded a sufficient number of times might detect a change in path length.  However, the number of folds required is large.  For example, given a rotating interferometer of 2.44 meters length (the same length as my instrument), it would require 406000 (four hundred six thousand) folds to produce a change in light path length equal to the lateral deflection.  That’s equivalent to a light path length of 990.6 km.  It’s not as bad as all that, of course – the interferometer might start responding (i.e., the effect become photographically detectable using my camera) at my wavelength once the change in light path reached only 100 angstroms at around 350 folds.  But the displacement measured by the interferometer would still be less than 1/500^th the actual magnitude. 

The effect detected by any practical interferometer would always be significantly less than the actual.

This model also has a predictive consequence.  If I accept a vector product model (inspired by the complete lack of reports of this phenomenon in interferometry), then this deflection is capable of causing curved motion over large distances just like other vector product fields.  Light emitted by the sun and other stars should curve over astronomically large distances.  Further, there should be an ecliptic latitude for which a photon emitted by the sun at that angle will be curved around in a complete orbit to return to the sun.  Given the magnitude of the measured deflection, the minimum diameter of such an orbit could be as small as 20 light days. 

If the measured effect follows my model, is constant, and is universal, then there should be a band across the sky where this returned sunlight is visible.  The band would have no complex structure, be clearly visible in long exposure astrophotographs, and need not lie in the plane of the ecliptic.

There is no such band. 

The Milky Way and Zodiacal Light both have too much structure to be accounted for in this fashion, and there are no similar astronomical effects that could be explained in this fashion.  This implies that the hypothetical field is not universal, nor absolute, and diminishes well within 20 light days of the sun.

I’m still seeing evidence of a vector reference, but it’s probably not an absolute vector reference.