[time-nuts] de Witte's Experiment

[Magnus Danielson]

On 08/27/2013 07:39 PM, Tom Van Baak wrote:
> Hi Steven,
>
> You can contact me off-line about this if you want more information.
>
> Being someone with plenty of cesium clocks I looked into his claims in the late 90's. His cables and electronics were not at all temperature compensated. It's a simple mistake we all make at one point or another in our time-nuts career.
>
> Once you deal with tempco correctly no one has problems like he saw, whether your clocks are as old as the one he used in 1991 or modern ones that are ten to a thousand times more accurate.
>
> Note he ran his experiment for 178 days. If you run a ground temperature experiment for a full year (or years) you get complete temperature cycles; if you happen to pick only half a year, starting early summer as he did, you get a slow ramp.
>
> When you combine diurnal changes (which he saw) with half-year ramps (which he mis-interpreted) you get a solar-sidereal effect that looks extra-terrestrial. Roland was a little too eager to prove aether exists and textbooks were wrong. Unfortunately he died shortly before I could email him about his methods and raw data. That was, what, 15 years ago.

Besides damping variations by digging the cables deeper, you can run
two-way time-transfer and that way both monitor and cancel the
temperature effect.

Cheers,
Magnus