Interviewer: Has there ever been an experiment done to prove that the Earth is revolving around the Sun?
Interviewee: Yes, there were several experiments in the 1800s—Dominique Arago, Augustin Fresnel—but one of the most famous was the Michelson-Morley experiment in 1887.
Interviewer: Tell us about that.
Interviewee: They used light beams to measure whether the Earth was moving and found no evidence of movement. The Earth should be moving at 30 kilometers per second to complete its annual revolution, but the experiment indicated it wasn’t. Michelson’s instruments were so sensitive that they could have detected movement to within one-hundredth of what was expected, yet they found none.
Interviewer: What did the experiment involve in terms of apparatus, so we can get a concrete understanding of what they found?
Interviewee: The idea was simple: if the Earth is moving around the Sun, and you shoot one light beam in the direction of the Earth’s motion and another beam perpendicular to it, the beam in the direction of motion should experience some kind of impedance as it moves through space, while the perpendicular beam would not.
Interviewer: Why not?
Interviewee: Because the perpendicular beam isn’t moving through space in the same way; it’s just traveling north and south. The expectation was to detect a difference between the two beams that corresponded to the Earth’s movement—around 30 kilometers per second—but no difference was found.
Interviewer: So what was the natural interpretation of that result?
Interviewee: The natural interpretation, which even Einstein, Mach, and Bohr admitted, is that the Earth isn’t moving. This created a significant problem for the heliocentric model. To resolve it, special relativity was introduced. The theory suggests that the reason the light beam wasn’t affected when moving with the Earth’s motion was that the apparatus itself contracted—Michelson’s apparatus physically shortened as it moved with the Earth in its orbit around the Sun.
Interviewer: Wait, are you saying the idea of mass contraction was invented to explain away the results of the Michelson-Morley experiment?
Interviewee: Exactly. My book explains this in detail—it’s an idea that has been openly admitted by scientists.
Interviewer: Isn’t there any experimental confirmation that as you approach the speed of light, there’s a contraction effect? The impression is that there’s plenty of experimental evidence for it.
Interviewee: That impression is false. There’s no experimental proof of this contraction effect. Physicists themselves admit there’s no direct evidence. It’s a theoretical concept that was put into a mathematical framework called the Lorentz transformation, which is now one of the most famous equations in physics.
Interviewer: Does anyone openly admit that this contraction effect was invented because otherwise, they’d have to accept the Earth isn’t moving?
Interviewee: Yes, the very scientist who introduced it—Heinrich Lorentz.
Interviewer: What did he say?
Interviewee: Lorentz admitted that he had no other explanation for the results of the Michelson-Morley experiment. Without invoking contraction, the only conclusion would be that the Earth is stationary in space.
Interviewer: Unbelievable.