NEW NONZERO PHOTON MASS INTERPRETATION OF THE SAGNAC EFFECT AS DIRECTEXPERIMENTAL JUSTIFICATION OF THE LANGEVIN PARADOX

The experimental discovery by Dufour and Prunier that the Sagnac fring e displacement does not change when the sourer and fringe detector are locally transferred from the rotating platform to the laboratory fram e is interpreted as a natural result of general relativity theory when one introduces non-zero mass photons into the theory of light. It als o yields a proof of the reality of Langevin's paradox as a natural con sequence of assuming that non-zero mass photons (1) follow real space- time paths, (2) are associated with real physical internal clock-like motions, (3) imply the existence of an absolute local inertial frame S igma(0) first associated by Lorentz with Maxwell's equations. (C) Publ ished by Elsevier Science B.V.