MG14 - Talk detail

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Abstract

Space-time might have the fundamental stochastic nature of a turbulent fluid. This idea has phenomenological implications for those ‘ether-drift’ experiments that look for a preferred reference frame. Present experiments with vacuum optical resonators are unable to decide if the irregular instantaneous signal is just spurious noise or has a genuine physical origin. For further checks, experiments in gaseous systems are particularly interesting. In fact, the transformation matrix, which connects the effective space-time metric for light propagation in the laboratory frame to the corresponding isotropic metric in the hypothetical preferred frame, is a two-valued function for a refractive index N=1. The resulting light anisotropy, in an infinitesimal region around N=1, when combined with the idea of a stochastic space-time, shows that the small irregular residuals observed in all classical ether-drift experiments and in the 1963 MIT experiment with He-Ne lasers point to the same Earth's velocity of 370 km/s obtained from astronomical observations of the CMB. This remarkable agreement should motivate additional tests with a new generation of precise laser interferometry experiments.

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