greendoor wrote:Fletcher wrote:... but you'd think an aether could be proved conclusively if it exists - it must be a real & tangible substance able to be measured i.e. have inertia & viscosity etc !?
The need for an aether was obvious to the biggest brains in physics - a wave needs a medium to wave. Otherwise not just light needs to be a particle, but the entire electromagnetic spectrum, and gravity too ... a force cannot propagate instantaneously through nothing ...
The need for an aether is overwhelming .. so on what basis was it thrown out? The 'best brains' that you mention will refer to Michelson Morley ... which is one of the many embarrassing frauds and cover ups of physics.
The stupid assumption that made an ass out of Michelson, Morley, Einstein et al was the assumption that IF an aether existed, that the Earth was rotating relative to it. Why was this assumption made? Logically (to me at least) IF all mass is composed of Aether, then Earth will be so completely embedded into the Aether that there can be no relative difference in velocity at all ...
Anyhow - on the basis of measuring the speed of light traveling with the rotation of the earth, and comparing the speed of light traveling against the rotation of the earth, they found no relative difference. Actually - there is reason to believe that the actual results of this and subsequent tests at higher altitude had a lot of noise and this conclusion was fairly fraudulent anyway. But even supposing that there is actually no relative velocity difference - is this sufficient reason to throw out the requirement for an aether medium for waves?
Some of the academics who we venerate were just 20 something year old kids who, in all probability, didn't have the life skills to fix their car if it broke down. We have a strange faith in the ability of these people to be able to think straight ... academics don't necessarily live in the real world. Just because they can baffle us with bullshit about the intellectual house of cards they have constructed doesn't mean it actually models our universe.
I can't see any valid reason why the aether was dispensed with so thoughtlessly. And I see not logical response to the question that won't go away: what is the medium that is being waved?????????????????????????
The Kasimir Effect gives us a solid reason to believe that empty space has substance. But that's essentially just restating the obvious that space IS full of waves which can be shielded. A study of the night sky should convince us that waves DO travel through space, and that they can be shielded. Or do we just dispense with waves?? That would make much more sense, if we have to dispense with the wave-medium. But then we must call all waves particles and assign them with mass. And then what about the experiments that proved that waves were waves and not particles ...
Throwing out the aether was just dumb, and served no purpose. It greatly assists the faith of those who believe that God does not exist. I suspect that is the greatest appeal of this concept. It is far more difficult to dispense with the concept of God in the face of an invisible yet all powerful, all present, and apparantly all intelligent medium pervading an infinite universe ...
But in it's place, it creates a requirement to believe that all the matter and energy, and all the rules of the universe, existed at one time in a singularity that exploded ... solves nothing, and doesn't explain anything at all. Just postpones the inevitable.