With the release of our papers on Relativity, Special and General, extracted from the first volume of Aetherometry (Aether wars in XXth century Physics), we drew the attention of careful readers to the fact that, for Physics to move forward at the dawn of the XXth century, it first had to discard the confabulations of both a static luminiferous and an electromagnetic Aether. Einstein's courage is, in this respect, to be admired - he showed, in fact, how the king was naked. And so is his ability to discern the likelihood of the existence of a nonelectromagnetic dynamic Aether, which he originally envisaged as being gravitational in nature. Our aetherometric science has been methodically led to disagree from the notion that the nature of the Aether is gravitational - even if the 'gravitational field' is nothing short of a specific form of existence of Aether energy 'ontologically' affected to mass-energy. Moreover, as those papers on Relativity demonstrate over and over again, Einstein increasingly fell prey to a geometrism of fields, to a mathematical metaphysics devoid of an energetic basis. One might argue that this was inevitable the moment Einstein recuperated Lorentz's transformations and electrodynamics, given that, for instance, the spatialization of Time is already inherent in Lorentz's hypothesis. Be that all as it may, Tesla first and then Reich drew our attention to the existence of a massfree longitudinal form of electric radiation that was not reducible to electromagnetic fields, waves or energy - a form which they viewed as a fundamental manifestation of Aether energy. Neither one regarded the null result of the Michelson-Morley-type experiments as any kind of impediment to a theory of a dynamic Aether.

The reaction to Einstein's affirmation of the null result was, as is well known, one that originally crystallized in what its proponents called "Aryan Physics". Its most outspoken representative, Lenard, strenuously objected to "the abolition of the Aether" - yet managed somehow to accept relativity as a principle that applied to gravitation, while he theoretized about an "Ur-Aether". Today, of course, most have forgotten that there was another current of Physics within (that's right) National Socialism - one that defended the validity of the procedures of both Special Relativity and Quantum Mechanics, and was spearheaded by Planck and Heisenberg. Whereas Lenard, Stark and their acolytes had, in the 1920's, denounced Heisenberg as "spirit of Einstein's spirit", Heisenberg eventually got his revanche, in 1937, when Rosenberg and Himmler chose to support him - over the Lenard tendency - and came to regard party ideology as being independent from "dogmas on cosmophysics". The Nazis, of course, were rewarded with all the efforts Heisenberg made to build atomic piles and develop a fission bomb. Post-war American Physics has denazified or 'cleaned up' the Heisenberg image - so that no one today would perceive the political implications of his scientific thinking. Instead, to this day, it is regarded as apolitical...

In a very real sense, the mathematical probabilism of Heisenberg is far more responsible for the present derangement of science than Einstein's Relativity ever was. To the public and the establishment, however, a rehabilitated Heisenberg had once again become the "spirit of Einstein's spirit", no matter how revulsed Einstein was with such a notion.

In the US, one of the most skeptical of physicists opposed to Relativity was Dayton Miller. Lenard had made a variety of claims regarding demonstration of an Aether with modified reproductions of the MM experiment. And Miller, like Michelson, was still convinced that a static electromagnetic Aether would be demonstrated sooner or later. After the 1921 Mt. Wilson experiments, Miller was nearly ready to abandon the pursuit - but with the encouragement of Lorentz, he re-engaged the work that would lead him to the "Ether Drift experiments" of 1925, performed with a much improved interferometer. And ever since then, those who seek to re-establish the old notion of a static Aether that would be detected by its supposed drift, have taken recourse to Miller's results, pushing them to the forefront as if they were a repressed of Physics that betrayed the "truth of an electromagnetic Aether". However, Miller never fully achieved a demonstration that the borderline periodic displacements he observed could not be related to sensible and latent heat lag effects derived from solar ambipolar radiation. And none of this rules out the possible existence of nonrandom, systematic and periodic effects in Miller's data.

On the other hand, Miller himself eventually acknowledged that there were thermal effects at work. Since he wanted his apparatus to be as exposed to the elements as possible, it would invariably detect a diurnal variation in the start-up calibration (to say that sunlight might have caused spurious peaks is of little use if complete diurnal atmospheric records were not being kept; for instance, he should have taken control temperatures of the room, walls and roof, which apparently he did not). Nowhere does Miller seem to have controlled for this in a systematic fashion. But it is not just the heating effect of the sun upon the atmosphere that one should consider (even if it happened only once, which is rather unlikely...), but equally the cooling effect of nighttime. We have seen these effects in ORACs and therefore can easily suppose that they would affect such a sensitive interferometer as Miller's.

More disturbing still is that the data Miller obtained - with his final and improved interferometer - yielded two very different reports of the direction of the aether drift: in 1926 he reported in Science (63:436) that the absolute motion of the earth was towards the head of Draco, RA 17h, North Dec. +65°, in the Northern Celestial Hemisphere; whereas by 1933, the motion was towards Dorado in the Southern celestial Hemisphere, nearly 180° off. Yet, the value of the drift remained at ca 200 km/sec, and the drag lowered it to the same 9 or 10 km/sec at ca 1.8 km altitude.

How do the Miller experiments relate to that other line of Physics that Tesla and Reich stood for? Reichians in general tend to quote the residuals of the Morley-Miller and Miller experiments as evidence for a conspiracy to deny existence to the Aether. But the Aether they speak of is certainly not the Aether of Tesla or the ORgone of Reich; it is rather more like the Meta-Aether of Lenard - an electromagnetic fiction of a disembodied reality. Indeed, Reich himself disputed the validity of the two premises of the MM experiment which Miller sought to extend: that the Aether is at rest, and that light travels through Space. Hence, this territorialization of Reichianism on the Morley-Miller and Miller experiments is not the result of Reich's thought, but rather the result of the impotence of Reich's followers to actually follow his thought. Reich was evidently aware of the MM experiment and subsequent reproductions by Morley, Miller and others. His own experiments had demonstrated to him that there existed a massfree energy, an ORgone Aether - and that its existence did not require, in any way, shape, or form, the presence of an electromagnetic Aether drag.

To better understand the differences between these very different approaches to the problem of an Aether - the Relativists on one side, the classical Aether adherents on another, and Tesla and Reich on still another side - let us summarily systematize the alternative Aether models whose confrontation Relativity has now obscured:

1. If the aether were a static fabric of space, and the earth did not entrain it, the MM experiment should have measured the translatory motions of the earth, whether solar or galactic, or both. As it did not, the hypothesis of a non-entrained stationary aether could be ruled out.

2. If the 'inertial motion' of the earth entrains a stationary aether to create an aetherosphere - thus dragging the aether along - the relative velocity between the aether and the earth may be zero (if the aetherosphere was a fixed skin) or very small (with the aether lagging behind the earth's movement of rotation, since the latter entrains it). If it were zero, then a negative result to the MM experiment should also be expected. And if it were a small lag (necessarily referenced to rotation, given that a drag referenced to translation would have to yield a lag only when the interferometry experiments were conducted during daytime), it would also fit with a nearly null result, yet it would directly contradict the West to East motion detected by the Sagnac-type experiments - and require precisely a reverse lag (an apparent aetherospheric motion from East to West).

The two preceding alternative models are based on the notion that the rotary and translatory motions of the Earth are givens that cannot be directly explained by any form of coupling to an Aether which is seen as stationary, and through which the Earth somehow moves. In the second model - that of entrainment or dragging of the Aether - the earth is construed to move 'like a rotating ball on stagnant water', as W. Reich put it.

Now, what to one's mind is confusing about Miller's notion of an Aether Drift is that, at the end of the day, it appears to have nothing in common with the aether drag (rotary or translatory) models - since it suggests that Miller's measurements consisted of a detection of a cosmological aether drift that carries the Earth along with the solar system. But it argues it detects this 'translational' drift at altitude, as a much slower velocity of the Aether due to an Aether drag model of the aetherosphere (otherwise the displacement fringes would have to be substantial - and they were not).

However, there is another way to construe an Aether model that fits both the null result of the MM-type experiments and the results of the Sagnac-type experiments:

3. In this model, it would not be the Earth that would entrain a stationary aether, but instead a consistent motion of the Aether that would propel forward the Earth , the Solar System and even the entire Galaxy or the Local Group. To again employ Reich's words, 'the analogy is that of a ball rolling on water waves more slowly than the waves'. There would still be an aetherosphere, created not by dragging a stationary aether, but by a consistent aether spin (the result of the superimposition of multiple such spins, at a cosmic, galactic, solar and planetarian level) propelling at once both the rotary and translatory motions of the Earth. Outside of the aetherosphere, a much faster aether flux should be detectable, but the aether impulses would impart angular momentum to the planet by curving in along finite cycloidal paths towards the planet's surface, their energy being partially absorbed to drive the Earth's motions, as the wave impulses slow down to near the Earth's speed of rotary motion.

This third model would fit in with the notion that the MM-type experiments should yield a null result, until and unless their resolution approached measurement of that slightly faster mean rotation of the aetherosphere, on the order of 50-100 or so m/sec faster than the local terrestrial speed of rotation. And the same model would also fit in with the notion that Sagnac-type experiments should be able to measure the rotary motion of the interferometer, and when conducted as a planetarian Sagnac, should yield a faster motion of the atmosphere from West to East, in the same direction as the rotation of the planet. It follows that only the third hypothesis fits the experimental findings, and remains 'unbothered' by the small MM residuals. Moreover, unlike the previous two models of the stationary Aether (undragged and dragged), the third model proposes a dynamic Aether that itself explains the nearly-perpetual motions of the planet - motions which, thereby, are not treated as simply 'given', but are functionally explained. The motion of the Earth is then seen clearly as the result of the motion of this dynamic Aether.

One might wrongly call this aether flux model, an 'aether drift model' - where the Earth, the Sun and the other planets are dragged along by an aether drift referenced to 'the distant stars'. But the notion of drift itself conjures up the notion of an original event that impelled this drift - such as the mythical Big Bang extracted from the New Aether Drift axed on the microwave CBR - rather than the concept of an ongoing multiple-layered superimposition of synchronous and consistent fluxes of aether spin that permanently impel astrophysical bodies, and where the lag of the motion of these bodies to their spinning aetherosphere is constitutive of the surface currents sustaining their very rotation and translation, much as the lag of drag-cup motors yields eddy currents that are constitutive of rotor motion (hence the technical concept of slip is nonsensical in drag-cups).

In accordance with this model, one should indeed be also able to detect greater motion of satellites near the shear zone when the aether impulses slow down. This is an old question that goes back to the work of Newton. And it is indeed true that beginning at an equatorial geostationary distance of 35,862 km above the Earth, when the translatory speed of a satellite around the Earth's axis is ca 3 km/sec, satellite speed increases steadily to a value of 7.8 km/sec at ca 100 Km above the Earth, and to some slightly higher value at a slightly lower altitude still; but then, instead of continuing to increase to a theoretical 7.9 km/sec at the Earth's surface, the satellite is dragged down, suddenly decelerated - so that at tropospheric altitudes, the speed of the flux holding an imaginary satellite afloat in a trajectory parallel to the earth would not be any faster than the variable speed (0.01 to 0.1 km/sec) of the jet stream with respect to the Earth. Note also that it is along the ridges and troughs of the jet stream that cyclonic and anticyclonic systems couple themselves, much as eddy currents counter-couple themselves on the surface of a drag-cup. A suitable approximation would be ca 0.5 km/sec at altitudes of ca 10 Km, in temperate latitudes. This abrupt slowing down of the inner concentric layers of the spinning aetherosphere below 100 Km results precisely from the atmospheric and terrestrial absorption of the impulses of the 'aether stream' - and causes, of course, the illusion that free fall is a motion along the vertical.

The question then arises as to whether Miller could have detected that aether motion (and without reference to the W to E motion of the OR envelope), once it slowed down and encircled the planet at a slightly faster rate than the motion of the surface or the rotation of the planet. At ca 1.8 km altitude, and in light of the preceding, it seems unlikely that the value of an aether drift at 9 to 10 km/sec could ever be real.

Lastly, Miller's speed and direction of the 'Aether Drift' do not agree with the more recent measurements made with respect to the CBR (for instance, and as possibly still the most reliable one, Smoot et al give a direction that is nearly normal to the Draco-Dorado line). This is the crux of the matter. If Miller was detecting an Aether Drift involving some (ultimate) translational component of the Earth's motion, and if this drift motion was distorted because, above all, the rotation of the Earth through an Aether entrained the latter and dragged down its speed past the Earth, then by any drag model this would imply a slip of the Aether at the surface of the rotating body. Hence Miller's idea of conducting the experiment at altitude. But since the experiment never detected the full slip one would expect (only a third, at best), it affords no real empirical reason to hold on to the classical view of a stationary Aether. The irrationalism of those that keep clinging to this is, at bottom, part of the same reaction that once branded Einstein's work "Jewish Physics". A slip of the aether at the surface of the Earth should translate either into a fixed aetherosphere at or near the surface, or into a slip, with apparent E to W motion that could explain the residuals. Therefore any test for altered propagation in the rotational plane of the Earth (planetarian Sagnac and MGP) should be able to confirm either the absence of any alteration or an apparent E to W motion - and that is not the case. To my understanding, this means that what has been effectively ruled out from all these various experiments is precisely the notion that, in moving through Space, the Earth entrains the Aether.

Were the speed of the drifting Aether dragged down by the rotary motion of the Earth, one should expect that one might observe a cosmic variation when the light path is at 90° to the path of the Earth's orbit around the Sun, over a suitably long period of observations, just as Miller did. However, confronted with his results, one is hard put to see how a body rotating with surface speeds no greater than 0.46 km/sec (at the equator) would slow down a drift of 200 km/sec to ca 10 km/sec at 1.8 km altitude, well within the troposphere. It is simply an act of faith to hold on to an entrained aether model and at the same time hold on to the view that, within the troposphere, there is an aether motion at 10 km/sec pointing to somewhere along the arc joining Draco and Dorado. For this aether motion, in any aether drag model, would have to represent a slip with respect to the earth's rotation at such low altitudes that it would be, for all purposes, nearly parallel to the surface.

Model #3 is therefore the only one consistent with all the other facts of Physics: the Earth neither moves through the Aether, nor is it impelled by some cosmic Big Bang or a Hand of God in a vacuum of Space. Rather, it is the Aether that moves the Earth, because the Aether is in a perpetual state of ordered motion. The terrestrial atmospheric laminar flows and main shear zone(s) thus arise from the slowing down of the overall Aether flux - as a function of the angular momentum imparted by this flux to the planet and to the mass in its atmosphere.