Aether Linear Thread

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junglelord
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Aether Linear Thread

Unread post by junglelord » Sun May 04, 2008 6:00 pm

I would like to dedicate a linear dialogue to the subject of the Aether only. This is a very good first post from our member Graycloud which was orginally posted in a thread dedicated to TOE Comparative Analysis, but really serves the direction of this thread. I am trying a system of linear and non linear concepts to organize the forum and complex subjects and serve the human condition. Please assit me to fill this thread with historical evidence of the Aether.
Grey Cloud wrote:I would like to start off with some thoughts about the aether. I will mention the word 'creation' at some point. I know that in the US the word carries a lot of baggage but here in the UK it doesn't. For the record I do not subscribe to any religion or religious group; never have done and never will. I have no time for Darwinism either. I plough my own furrow.

Creation myths.
From Nordic myth: Ginnunga, which means gap or void or abyss.
"The abyss between Niflheim (the region of fog) and Muspelheim (the region of heat). It existed before either land or sea, heaven or earth".
[From E. Cobham Brewer 1810–1897. Dictionary of Phrase and Fable. 1898 at http://www.bartleby.com/81/7198.html ]
1. gap, abyss = volume?
2. fog (water) and heat (fire) = two opposites? In some versions these are Frost Giants (N) and Fire Giants (S).

Greek: Kaos, which means yawning chasm or gaping void. There are varying accounts of what came out of this:
Hesiod (C7th BCE)- Nyx (Night), Erebus (Darkness), Gaea (Earth) and Tartarus (Underworld). To me this doesn't make sense; for a kick-off it violates the Law of Three.
Heraclitus (c. 535-475BCE) gives justice and strife as the two opposites. Heraclitus also criticises Hesiod for thinking that day and night are two separate things.

I Ching (Bart Marshall trans.): Dao from which comes One and two. You wont get this one via analysis, logic and your brain.

Qabala: "We start with the archetypal, the world as an idea, a thought, a mathematical conception such as space, which contains all things. To this idea we add a creative impulse, and the world is endowed with a will to unfold itself and we enter the sphere of time, of thought in extension. From this unfolding emerges form - geometricity, or a multiplication of spaces, shadows of things to be. So far there is no materiality; only mathematics, numbers, and letters; symbols, of shapes which are still dreaming. Lastly, in these forms movement is born and they become what we call substantial; then only do we enter the physical world of action - of materialized thought".
JFC Fuller - The Secret Wisdom of the Qabalah. Page 36.

The Aether.
In Plato's Cratylus, which I have just finished, Socrates states that 'aether' is derived from 'eitheer' '"because it is always running in a flux about the air".
What I take that to mean is that aether is the medium in which air travels or moves. Is this what some scientists are saying it is? This explanation doesn't do it for me.

In my way of understanding things, I view the Universe as a womb. That is to say an environment where that which is inside it is provided with all its needs as and when they are needed. With this analogy, aether would correspond to the amniotic fluid.
Some examples: The Dao aka the Dark Mother; Isis aka the Mother of the World; Mother Nature.

In a similar vein: Oceanus - the world ocean in Greek myth and the world ocean of Nordic myth. (Neither of these have anything to do with a belief in a flat Earth).
And David Bohm's Implicate Order?

My eyes have died. I'll let you techy-types pick the bones out of this lot and give it Form and Structure.
If you only knew the magnificence of the 3, 6 and 9, then you would have a key to the universe.
— Nikola Tesla
Casting Out the Nines from PHI into Indigs reveals the Cosmic Harmonic Code.
— Junglelord.
Knowledge is Structured in Consciouness. Structure and Function Cannot Be Seperated.
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Re: Aether Linear Thread

Unread post by StevenO » Mon May 05, 2008 5:08 am

For "modern" theories (Maxwell, SR, GR, QM) the aether is not technically required, however with the loss of the aether we also lost most of the "natural philosophers" and replaced them with mathematicians. The role of these philisophers is now fulfilled by websites like EU and discussed through the internet. The link with mainstream science is however broken because of these mathematical fortresses that have to be conquired before a discussion is even allowed...

Anyhow, my personal opinion is still that an aether is not really required for the basic physics we apply today. It would just get in the way. This does not mean that instead of the aether we have a "void" since that would be a logical contradiction. A nice description of what would explain aether properties is given by Carver Mead in an interview:
<...>
So early on you knew that electrons were real.

The electrons were real, the voltages were real, the phase of the sine-wave was real, the current was real. These were real things. They were just as real as the water going down through the pipes. You listen to the technology, and you know that these things are totally real, and totally intuitive.

But they're also waves, right? Then what are they waving in?

It's interesting, isn't it? That has hung people up ever since the time of Clerk Maxwell, and it's the missing piece of intuition that we need to develop in young people. The electron isn't the disturbance of something else. It is its own thing. The electron is the thing that's wiggling, and the wave is the electron. It is its own medium. You don't need something for it to be in, because if you did it would be buffeted about and all messed up. So the only pure way to have a wave is for it to be its own medium. The electron isn't something that has a fixed physical shape. Waves propagate outwards, and they can be large or small. That's what waves do.

So how big is an electron?

It expands to fit the container it's in. That may be a positive charge that's attracting it--a hydrogen atom--or the walls of a conductor. A piece of wire is a container for electrons. They simply fill out the piece of wire. That's what all waves do. If you try to gather them into a smaller space, the energy level goes up. That's what these Copenhagen guys call the Heisenberg uncertainty principle. But there's nothing uncertain about it. It's just a property of waves. Confine them, and you have more wavelengths in a given space, and that means a higher frequency and higher energy. But a quantum wave also tends to go to the state of lowest energy, so it will expand as long as you let it. You can make an electron that's ten feet across, there's no problem with that. It's its own medium, right? And it gets to be less and less dense as you let it expand. People regularly do experiments with neutrons that are a foot across.

A ten-foot electron! Amazing

It could be a mile. The electrons in my superconducting magnet are that long.

A mile-long electron! That alters our picture of the world--most people's minds think about atoms as tiny solar systems.

Right, that's what I was brought up on-this little grain of something. Now it's true that if you take a proton and you put it together with an electron, you get something that we call a hydrogen atom. But what that is, in fact, is a self-consistent solution of the two waves interacting with each other. They want to be close together because one's positive and the other is negative, and when they get closer that makes the energy lower. But if they get too close they wiggle too much and that makes the energy higher. So there's a place where they are just right, and that's what determines the size of the hydrogen atom. And that optimum is a self-consistent solution of the Schrodinger equation.
<...>
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Re: Aether Linear Thread

Unread post by Grey Cloud » Mon May 05, 2008 6:06 am

Hi StevenO

Just to clarify. Void in the context I am using it, does not mean 'void of ...', as in a vacuum.The void is the container if you will. It contains, or is full of, the basic 'ingredient' of the Universe. What that 'ingredient', 'substance', 'thing' is, I have no idea. Put another way, it, the 'void' contains in potentio everything the Universe has required, does require and will ever require.

From the Carver Mead quote:
The electron isn't the disturbance of something else. It is its own thing. The electron is the thing that's wiggling, and the wave is the electron. It is its own medium. You don't need something for it to be in, because if you did it would be buffeted about and all messed up. So the only pure way to have a wave is for it to be its own medium. The electron isn't something that has a fixed physical shape.
1. Okay so you have an electron here that is its own medium, and over there you have another electron which is its own medium. Where, or in what, are these two media operating?
2. To assume that an electron 'would be buffeted about and all messed up', is to assume an unintelligent Universe. That is to say, one without an over-arching guiding principle or Logos as Heraclitus called it.
3. Mead's comment that an electron doesn't have a fixed physical shape (and presumably size?) begs the same question from my point 1 above: where, or in what, is this shape-changing taking place.

Just for the record, I take the stance that nothing has a fixed physical shape, size or whatever because nothing is physical. Everything is a real illusion. :shock:
Please feel free to dumb-down any science/tech aspects of your reply.
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Re: Aether Linear Thread

Unread post by StevenO » Mon May 05, 2008 12:10 pm

Grey Cloud wrote:Just to clarify. Void in the context I am using it, does not mean 'void of ...', as in a vacuum.The void is the container if you will. It contains, or is full of, the basic 'ingredient' of the Universe. What that 'ingredient', 'substance', 'thing' is, I have no idea. Put another way, it, the 'void' contains in potentio everything the Universe has required, does require and will ever require.
I agree with that. There has to be something.
From the Carver Mead quote:
The electron isn't the disturbance of something else. It is its own thing. The electron is the thing that's wiggling, and the wave is the electron. It is its own medium. You don't need something for it to be in, because if you did it would be buffeted about and all messed up. So the only pure way to have a wave is for it to be its own medium. The electron isn't something that has a fixed physical shape.
1. Okay so you have an electron here that is its own medium, and over there you have another electron which is its own medium. Where, or in what, are these two media operating?
2. To assume that an electron 'would be buffeted about and all messed up', is to assume an unintelligent Universe. That is to say, one without an over-arching guiding principle or Logos as Heraclitus called it.
3. Mead's comment that an electron doesn't have a fixed physical shape (and presumably size?) begs the same question from my point 1 above: where, or in what, is this shape-changing taking place.
I think this is not what he means. He states that the electron itself has all the properties that others (Maxwell e.a.) would assign to the aether. To also imagine an ether would mess things up in the sense that it gets more complicated than necessary. Two electrons (or electric charges) will interfere with eachother.

Here comes an interesting point BTW. because if the aether is an elastic medium as we would assume for a medium that propagates waves, it cannot be a carrier of force. Waves in an elastic medium do not interact, they just pass through eachother. To have interaction (aka. force/momentum) requires a non-lineair medium. So, if you assume the aether is a lineair medium I would say that is redundant. The electron is more elementary since it also contains the non-lineair parts (mass and charge).
Just for the record, I take the stance that nothing has a fixed physical shape, size or whatever because nothing is physical. Everything is a real illusion. :shock:
You are a Platonist? I could partially agree with you, in the sense that this whole world we observe and discuss is only in and out of our heads. "Cogito, ergo sum" (I think, therefore I am). For me that comes down to the whole purpose of human communication (for which we could reserve another thread). Just ask yourself: if we know that human language is a very primitive medium to describe things, and we know that our senses and brains must communicate to eachother in a myriad of direct ways, the why the hell in the world do we pretend to talk to ourselves (in our head I mean) in natural language? :shock:
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Re: Aether Linear Thread

Unread post by Grey Cloud » Mon May 05, 2008 1:21 pm

I think this is not what he means. He states that the electron itself has all the properties that others (Maxwell e.a.) would assign to the aether. To also imagine an ether would mess things up in the sense that it gets more complicated than necessary. Two electrons (or electric charges) will interfere with eachother.

Here comes an interesting point BTW. because if the aether is an elastic medium as we would assume for a medium that propagates waves, it cannot be a carrier of force. Waves in an elastic medium do not interact, they just pass through eachother. To have interaction (aka. force/momentum) requires a non-lineair medium. So, if you assume the aether is a lineair medium I would say that is redundant. The electron is more elementary since it also contains the non-lineair parts (mass and charge).
I think I understood most of that. I'm a little confused as to what an 'elastic' medium is, in that it is the wave that is doing the moving and the medium just has to be there (?). I also struggle (generally) with the concept of 'linear' (as used in the scientific context). In the 'real' world, sound and light tend to go out in all directions unless constrained to do otherwise (?).
You are a Platonist? I could partially agree with you, in the sense that this whole world we observe and discuss is only in and out of our heads. "Cogito, ergo sum" (I think, therefore I am). For me that comes down to the whole purpose of human communication (for which we could reserve another thread). Just ask yourself: if we know that human language is a very primitive medium to describe things, and we know that our senses and brains must communicate to eachother in a myriad of direct ways, the why the hell in the world do we pretend to talk to ourselves (in our head I mean) in natural language?


I'm more of an eclectic but I'm partial to Heraclitus, Plato and Nietzsche. I prefer - I am (have existence/consciousness), therefore I think (consciousness doesn't have much choice). U.G. Krishnamurti (the anti-guru) said 'you are just the thought of a thought'.
That's a great question/point you raised in that last sentence, one I'd not come across or considered. Off the top of my head: Perhaps it's part of the rules. I see us as a form of consciousness which is 'down here' being human. In Platonic terms, perhaps the higher mind has to talk to the lower mind in the language of the latter? Alchemists say more or less the same thing, or the same thing in a different vocabulary.
I often wonder what was going on in the heads of the Maya when I look at their glyphs etc.
If I have the least bit of knowledge
I will follow the great Way alone
and fear nothing but being sidetracked.
The great Way is simple
but people delight in complexity.
Tao Te Ching, 53.

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Re: Aether Linear Thread

Unread post by webolife » Mon May 05, 2008 3:57 pm

When I read "aether" I think field, then it makes sense in my model... I don't know what or if the aether is...
but I understand a potential field with kinetic effects... don't need a medium for that, so despite the fact that I mostly disagree with the mainstreamers, I guess I have this in common with them, for now. Gravity doesn't need a medium for me, and neither does light.
What keeps me interested in this thread is that I'm not sure whether my model negates the aether...
Truth extends beyond the border of self-limiting science. Free discourse among opposing viewpoints draws the open-minded away from the darkness of inevitable bias and nearer to the light of universal reality.

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Re: Aether Linear Thread

Unread post by junglelord » Mon May 05, 2008 4:26 pm

Thats why you always remind me of Wilbert Smith. He does not call it Aether which seems to bring foam to mind or crystals or fluid crystals. He calls the primary field the Tempic Gradient Field. It is a Quandrant Rule Universe. That is a Unified Field Model. His light model is yours. You both construct the EU the same as far as I can see. I think thats a feather in my cap and yours.
:D
If you only knew the magnificence of the 3, 6 and 9, then you would have a key to the universe.
— Nikola Tesla
Casting Out the Nines from PHI into Indigs reveals the Cosmic Harmonic Code.
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Re: Aether Linear Thread

Unread post by Grey Cloud » Mon May 05, 2008 4:48 pm

webolife wrote:When I read "aether" I think field, then it makes sense in my model... I don't know what or if the aether is...
but I understand a potential field with kinetic effects...don't need a medium for that, so despite the fact that I mostly disagree with the mainstreamers, I guess I have this in common with them, for now. Gravity doesn't need a mediumfor me, and neither does light.
What keeps me interested in this thread is that I'm not sure whether my model negates the aether...
From The Goons Show (50s radio, British)
Seagoon (finding Eccles in a coal cellar): What are you doing here?
Eccles: Everybody's gotta be somewhere.

I take a similar approach to you, I think, in that I read the stuff on the forum and convert/translate the terminology/vocabulary into my own.
If I have the least bit of knowledge
I will follow the great Way alone
and fear nothing but being sidetracked.
The great Way is simple
but people delight in complexity.
Tao Te Ching, 53.

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Re: Aether Linear Thread

Unread post by junglelord » Mon May 05, 2008 4:52 pm

You know I just double label or triple label ....or more...currently 7 names and growing.
LOL
Pulls out his harmonic and pulls off a little intro....
I got the, Scalar/Tempic/Gradient/Aether/Hydromagnetic/G Force/Primary Field, too many names I don't know what to call it longitudinal vortex blues....
:D :lol:
If you only knew the magnificence of the 3, 6 and 9, then you would have a key to the universe.
— Nikola Tesla
Casting Out the Nines from PHI into Indigs reveals the Cosmic Harmonic Code.
— Junglelord.
Knowledge is Structured in Consciouness. Structure and Function Cannot Be Seperated.
— Junglelord

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Re: Aether Linear Thread

Unread post by Grey Cloud » Mon May 05, 2008 5:06 pm

junglelord wrote:You know I just double label or triple label ....or more...currently 7 names and growing.
LOL
Pulls out his harmonic and pulls off a little intro....
I got the, Scalar/Tempic/Gradient/Aether/Hydromagnetic/G Force/Primary Field, too many names I don't know what to call it longitudinal vortex blues....
:D :lol:
You call it 'tomayto', I call it 'tomarto' - aether one's okay.
If I have the least bit of knowledge
I will follow the great Way alone
and fear nothing but being sidetracked.
The great Way is simple
but people delight in complexity.
Tao Te Ching, 53.

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Re: Aether Linear Thread

Unread post by Solar » Mon May 05, 2008 6:16 pm

junglelord wrote: I got the, Scalar/Tempic/Gradient/Aether/Hydromagnetic/G Force/Primary Field, too many names I don't know what to call it longitudinal vortex blues....
:D :lol:
LMAO!!! :D
"Our laws of force tend to be applied in the Newtonian sense in that for every action there is an equal reaction, and yet, in the real world, where many-body gravitational effects or electrodynamic actions prevail, we do not have every action paired with an equal reaction." — Harold Aspden

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Re: Aether Linear Thread

Unread post by junglelord » Fri May 09, 2008 6:50 pm

I came to a conclusion today the Aether is best described as the overlap of the primary dimensions.
I think that is the most primary way to describe it. I view it as more accurate then neutrinos or as a individual field.
If you only knew the magnificence of the 3, 6 and 9, then you would have a key to the universe.
— Nikola Tesla
Casting Out the Nines from PHI into Indigs reveals the Cosmic Harmonic Code.
— Junglelord.
Knowledge is Structured in Consciouness. Structure and Function Cannot Be Seperated.
— Junglelord

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Re: Aether Linear Thread

Unread post by bboyer » Sun May 11, 2008 2:19 pm

Einstein and the Aether

Laurent <cyberd...@gmail.com>

Einstein's aether - which is the aether I mostly talk about - isn't bound by time , but by topolgical properties, a set of ratios determined at the aether scale; frame independent constants. A very small number of fixed laws by which all matter and space must abide. Physical (real) but non-material quantities (topological). Time independent continuity and connectedness. We can also call it topological space, inertial space, or even momentum space.

Aether is what allows EPR (non-local communication) type phenomena to take place.

Lorentz invariant values originate at the aether level, they are real but non-material ratios which often help determine Lorentz invariant geometrical properties of objects. Take the fine structure constant for example, change its value and you get a totally different universe.

" Quantum phenomena are caused by fractal topological defects embedded in and forming a growing three-dimensional fractal process-space, which is essentially a quantum foam. " --- Reginald T. Cahill

"Topological space (aether) can be defined as a set with a collection of subsets satisfying the conditions that both the empty set and the set itself belong to the collection, the union of any number of the subsets is also an element of the collection, and the intersection of any finite number of the subsets is an element of the collection." -- Webster dictionary

Einstein's non-material aether of 1920 even comforms to topological quantum field theory.

" But therewith the conception of the ether has again acquired an intelligible content, although this content differs widely from that of the ether of the mechanical ondulatory theory of light. The ether of the general theory of relativity is a medium which is itself devoid of all mechanical and kinematical qualities, but helps to determine mechanical (and electromagnetic) events."

" Recapitulating, we may say that according to the general theory of relativity space is endowed with physical qualities; in this sense, therefore, there exists an ether. According to the general theory of relativity space without ether is unthinkable; for in such space there not only would be no propagation of light, but also no possibility of existence for standards of space and time (measuring-rods and clocks), nor therefore any space-time intervals in the physical sense. But this ether may not be thought of as endowed with the quality characteristic of ponderable media, as consisting of parts which may be tracked through time. The idea of motion may not be applied to it. " ------ Albert Einstein

[This are excerpts from a John Baez essay "Higher-dimensional algebra and Planck scale physics", published in the book "Physics Meets Philosophy at the Planck Scale"]

***" ...in topological quantum field theory we cannot measure time in seconds, because there is no background metric available to let us count the passage of time! We can only keep track of topological change. "***

" The topology of spacetime is arbitrary and there is no background metric. "

" Quantum topology is very technical, as anything involving mathematical physicists inevitably becomes. But if we stand back a moment, it should be perfectly obvious that differential topology and quantum theory must merge if we are to understand background-free quantum field theories. In physics that ignores general relativity, we treat space as a background on which the process of change occurs. But these are idealizations which we must overcome in a background-free theory. In fact, the concepts of 'space' and 'state' are two aspects of a unified whole, and likewise for the concepts of 'spacetime' and 'process'. It is a challenge, not just for mathematical physicists, but also for philosophers, to understand this more deeply. " -------- John Baez

"When theorizing about an all-inclusive reality, the first and most important principle is containment, which simply tells us what we should and should not be considering. Containment principles, already well known in cosmology, generally take the form of tautologies; e.g., "The physical universe contains all and only that which is physical." The predicate "physical", like all predicates, here corresponds to a structured set, "the physical universe" (because the universe has structure and contains objects, it is a structured set). But this usage of tautology is somewhat loose, for it technically amounts to a predicate-logical equivalent of propositional tautology called autology, meaning self-description. Specifically, the predicate physical is being defined on topological containment in the physical universe, which is tacitly defined on and descriptively contained in the predicate physical, so that the self-definition of "physical" is a two-step operation involving both topological and descriptive containment. While this principle, which we might regard as a statement of "physicalism", is often confused with materialism on the grounds that "physical" equals "material", the material may in fact be only a part of what makes up the physical. Similarly, the physical may only be a part of what makes up the real. Because the content of reality is a matter of science as opposed to mere semantics, this issue can be resolved only by rational or empirical evidence, not by assumption alone." -------- Christopher Michael Langan

http://www.ctmu.org/CTMU/Articles/IntroCTMU.html

---------------------------------------------------------

There isn't a change in the incoming flux of quantum matter (ZPR, material space, Guth's 'false vacuum') as much as there is a change in the information processing, or more simply said, a change in process speed.

Since the speed of light, hence, the propagation speed of fields, must remain constant for all the other constants to continue to be proportianally the same, process (mass) has to increase in order to keep up... to a point, once you go over the speed limit and fields can't keep up, matter disintegrates.

To measure aether drag all you need to do is measure the momentum of a moving object.

--------------------------------------------------------

Some say the aether concept was already discredited, but they are wrong. Please read carefully:

Einstein and the Ether - by Ludwik Kostro

(Apeiron, Montreal, 2000)

"Whether gravitational, electrical, and nuclear interactions can be encompassed within a unified theoretical structure, and whether such a structure will be conceived as a plenary space with physical properties, remains to be seen. But if the history of the successive dynasties of aether is any guide, we can eventually proclaim:

The luminiferous aether is dead!

Long live the aether!" --- Owen Gingerich

Nowadays, nobody talks any longer about the ether in scientific ortohodox books, in higher school or university classes, etc., yet this concept has been one of the corner stones of many rational interpretation of natural phenomena for a great long time - to such an extent that a good physicist recently wrote to us that all XIXth century physics tried to "prove the existence of the ether which was later proved not to exist".

If we ask why the ether has disappeared from the major scenes of our knowledge of Nature, everybody will answer that Einstein has proved, with his celebrated theory of relativity, that the ether does not exist. This was one of those concepts that old physicists were accustomed to use in their "primitive" speculations, but today, luckily, it has been completely overthrown, together with other similar relics of "superstition", by XXth century scientists. It was in that time that mankind has realized the greatest achievements of ever in science and technology, which can be interpreted as the goal of a long walk, that began thanks to such men like Copernic, Galilei, Descartes, Newton,... just sprung out from the darkness of Middle Ages.

"common people", and even the "common scientist", would be surprised in reading this book (about 240 pp.), written by the physicist and philosopher Ludwik Kostro, and intended for physicists as well as for historians of science, philosophers, or in general for any people interested in the development of scientific culture. As a matter of fact, it is entirely dedicated to the troublesome relationships between the greatest scientist of all times - or at least many people think so! - and the elusive ether.

Let us see the question with the author's own words (Introduction):

"In the eyes of most physicists and philosophers, Albert Einstein has acquired a reputation for abolishing the concept of the ether as a medium filling space (or identified with it), which was responsible for carrying electromagnetic, gravitational and other interactions. Today, this notion is echoed in textbooks, encyclopaedias, and scientific reviews. However, it does not fully reflect the historical truth, and in a sense even represents a distortion [...] Einstein denied the existence of the ether for only 11 years - from 1905 to 1916. Thereafter, he recognized that his attitude was too radical and even regretted that his works published before 1916 had so definitely and absolutely rejected the existence of the ether."

The author proves this assertion directly referring to the opinions which Einstein himself expressed during his life, in a book which is therefore full of quotations and precise bibliographical references (up to the point of quoting even the original Deutsch passages in a special appendix). Here they are some examples of Einstein's thoughts:

"It would have been more correct if I had limited myself, in my earlier publications, to emphasizing only the nonexistence of an ether velocity, instead of arguing the total nonexistence of the ether, for I can see that with the word ether we say nothing else than that space has to be viewed as a carrier of physical qualities."

Moreover:

" [...] in 1905 I was of the opinion that it was no longer allowed to speak about the ether in physics. This opinion, however, was too radical, as we will see later when we discuss the general theory of relativity. It does remain allowed, as always, to introduce a medium filling all space and to assume that the electromagnetic fields (and matter as well) are its states.

[...] once again 'empty' space appears as endowed with physical properties, i.e., no longer as physically empty, as seemed to be the case according to special relativity [...] ".

And again:

"This word ether has changed its meaning many times in the development if science [...] Its story, by no means finished, is continued by relativity theory."

It seems interesting to quote even the following passages by Einstein, where he somehow admits the rational necessity of the ether, that is to say, the necessity of conceiving a space which cannot be thought of but endowed with physical properties:

"There is an important argument in favour of the hypothesis of the ether. To deny the existence of the ether means, in the last analysis, denying all physical properties to empty space."

"The ether hypothesis was bound always to play a part even if it is mostly a latent one at first in the thinking of physicists."

http://itis.volta.alessandria.it/episteme/ep3-24.htm

----------------------------------------------------------------

From - ETHER AND THE THEORY OF RELATIVITY by A.Einstein (1920)

" But on the other hand there is a weighty argument to be adduced in favour of the ether hypothesis. To deny the ether is ultimately to assume that empty space has no physical qualities whatever. The fundamental facts of mechanics do not harmonize with this view. --- *For the mechanical behaviour of a corporeal system hovering freely in empty space depends not only on relative positions (distances) and relative velocities, but also on its state of rotation, which physically may be taken as a characteristic not appertaining to the system in itself.* --- In order to be able to look uponthe rotation of the system, at least formally, as something real, Newton objectivises space. --- * Since he classes his absolute space together with real things, for him rotation relative to an absolute space is also something real. Newton might no less well have called his absolute space "Ether"; what is essential is merely that besides observable objects, --- *another thing, which is not perceptible, must be looked upon as real,* --- to enable acceleration or rotation to be looked upon as something real.

It is true that Mach tried to avoid having to accept as real something which is not observable by endeavouring to substitute in mechanics a mean acceleration with reference to the totality of the masses in the universe in place of an acceleration with reference to absolute space. But inertial resistance opposed to relative acceleration of distant masses presupposes action at a distance; and as the modern physicist does not believe that he may accept this action at a distance, he comes back once more, if he follows Mach, to the ether, which has to serve as medium for the effects of inertia. But this conception of the ether to which we are led by Mach's way of thinking differs essentially from the ether as conceived by Newton, by Fresnel, and by Lorentz. Mach's ether not only conditions the behaviour of inert masses, but is also conditioned in its state by them.

Mach's idea finds its full development in the ether of the general theory of relativity. According to this theory the metrical qualities of the continuum of space-time differ in the environment of different points of space-time, and are partly conditioned by the matter existing outside of the territory under consideration.

(Which means that all points in space are interconnected) -- Laurent

This spacetime variability of the reciprocal relations of the standards of space and time, or, perhaps, the recognition of the fact that " empty space " in its physical relation is neither homogeneous nor isotropic, compelling us to describe its state by ten functions (the gravitation potentials g[greek subscript mu, nu]), has, I think, finally disposed of the view that space is physically empty. But therewith the conception of the ether has again acquired an intelligible content, although this content differs widely from that of the ether of the mechanical undulatory theory of light. --- *The ether of the general theory of relativity is a medium which is itself devoid of all mechanical and kinematical qualities, but helps to determine mechanical (and electromagnetic) events.*

What is fundamentally new in the ether of the general theory of relativity as opposed to the ether of Lorentz consists in this, --- *that the state of the former is at every place determined by connections with the matter and the state of the ether in neighbouring places,* --- which are amenable to law in the form of differential equations; whereas the state of the Lorentzian ether in the absence of electromagnetic fields is conditioned by nothing outside itself, and is everywhere the same. The ether of the general theory of relativity is transmuted conceptually into the ether of Lorentz if we substitute constants for the functions of space which describe the former, disregarding the causes which condition its state. Thus we may also say, I think, that the ether of the general theory of relativity is the outcome of the Lorentzian ether, through relativation. "

[...]

" ...when H. A. Lorentz entered upon the scene. He brought theory into harmony with experience by means of a wonderful simplification of theoretical principles. He achieved this, the most important advance in the theory of electricity since Maxwell, by taking from ether its mechanical, and from matter its electromagnetic qualities. As in empty space, so too in the interior of material bodies, the ether, and not matter viewed atomistically, was exclusively the seat of electromagnetic fields. According to Lorentz the elementary particles of matter alone are capable of carrying out movements; their electromagnetic activity is entirely confined to the carrying of electric charges. Thus Lorentz succeeded in reducing all electromagnetic happenings to Maxwell's equations for free space.

As to the mechanical nature of the Lorentzian ether, it may be said of it, in a somewhat playful spirit, that immobility is the only mechanical property of which it has not been deprived by H, A. Lorentz. It may be added that the whole change in the conception of the ether which the special theory of relativity brought about, consisted in taking away from the ether its last mechanical quality, namely, its immobility. " ---- Albert Einstein

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Sir Edmund T. Whittaker in the preface to his scholarly and scientific "A history of the Theories of Aether and Electricity" published in 1951 said:

"As everyone knows, the aether played a great part in the physics of the nineteenth century; but in the first decade of the twentieth, chiefly as result of the failure of attempts to observe the earth's motion relative to the aether, and the acceptance of the principle that such attempts must always fail, the word "aether" fell out of favour, and it became customary to refer to the interplanetary spaces as "vacuous"; the vacuum being conceived as mere emptiness, having no properties except that of propagating electromagnetic waves. But with the development of quantum electrodynamics, the vacuum has come to be regarded as the seat of the "zero-point" oscillations of the electromagnetic field, of the "zero-point" fluctuations of electric charge and current, and of a "polarisation" corresponding to a dielectric constant different from unity. It seems absurd to retain the name "vacuum" for an entity so rich in physical properties, and the historical word "aether" may fitly be retained." ----- Sir Edmund T. Whittaker

-----------------------------------

In 1954 P.A.M. Dirac, a Nobel Prize winner in physics in 1933, said -

"The aetherless basis of physical theory may have reached the end of its capabilities and we see in the aether a new hope for the future." --- P. Dirac

-----------------------------------

The science popularizer Zukav writes -

"Quantum field theory resurrects a new kind of ether, e.g. particles are excited states of the featureless ground state of the field (the vacuum state). The vacuum state is so featureless and has such high symmetry that we cannot assign a velocity to it experimentally." ---- G. Zukav

-----------------------------------

The very well known Tao of Physics by Capra states -

"This [quantum field] is indeed an entirely new concept which has been extended to describe all subatomic particles and their interactions, each type of particle corresponding to a different field. In these 'quantum field theories', the classical contrast between the solid particles and the space surrounding them is completely overcome. The quantum field is seen as the fundamental physical entity; a continuous medium which is present everywhere in space. Particles are merely local condensations of the field; concentrations of energy which come and go, thereby losing their individual character and dissolving into the underlying field. In the words of Albert Einstein:

" We may therefore regard matter as being constituted by the regions of space in which the field is extremely intense ... There is no place in this new kind of physics both for the field and matter, for the field is the only reality. " (page 210)

--------------------------------------------------------

And they allowed Apollonius to ask questions; ...and he asked them of what they thought the cosmos was composed; but they replied:

"Of elements."

"Are there then four" he asked.

"Not four," said Iarchas, "but five."

"And how can there be a fifth," said Apollonius, "alongside of water and air and earth and fire?"

"There is the ether", replied the other, "which we must regard as the stuff of which gods are made; for just as all mortal creatures inhale the air, so do immortal and divine natures inhale the ether."

Apollonius again asked which was the first of the elements, and Iarchas answered:

"All are simultaneous, for a living creature is not born bit by bit."

"Am I," said Apollonius, "to regard the universe as a living creature?"

"Yes," said the other, "if you have a sound knowledge of it, for it engenders all living things."

- The Life of Apollonius of Tyana, Philostratus, 220AD.

--------------------------------------------------------------

"Physical knowledge has advanced much since 1905, notably by the arrival of quantum mechanics, and the situation [about the scientific plausibility of aether] has again changed. If one examines the question in the light of present-day knowledge, one finds that the aether is no longer ruled out by relativity, and good reasons can now be advanced for postulating an aether. . . . We can now see that we may very well have an aether, subject to quantum mechanics and conformable to relativity, provided we are willing to consider a perfect vacuum as an idealized state, not attainable in practice. From the experimental point of view there does not seem to be any objection to this. We must make some profound alterations to the theoretical idea of the vacuum. . . . Thus, with the new theory of electrodynamics we are rather forced to have an aether."

---- P. A. M. Dirac, "Is There an Aether?"

Nature 168 (1951): 906-7.

----------------------------------------------------------

"...that one body may act upon another at a distance through a vacuum, without the mediation of anything else, by and through which their action and force may be conveyed from one to another, is to me so great an absurdity, that I believe no man, who has in philosophical matters a competent faculty of thinking, can ever fall into it. Gravity must be caused by an agent acting constantly according to certain laws, but whether this agent be material or immaterial I have left to the consideration of my readers." --- Isaac Newton

--------------------------------------------

-- Laurent
http://groups.google.com/group/alt.sci. ... 2acc2c5535?
There is something beyond our mind which abides in silence within our mind. It is the supreme mystery beyond thought. Let one's mind and one's subtle body rest upon that and not rest on anything else. [---][/---] Maitri Upanishad

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webolife
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Re: Aether Linear Thread

Unread post by webolife » Mon May 12, 2008 2:13 pm

Says Sir Isaac Newton at the end of the previous quote: "As for me, I feign no hypotheses."
But we all have taken up that charge, have we not? Pun intentional.
So many of the previous researcher-philosophers are asking the same (right) questions about the nature of the universal field, and the derivation of properties of matter from that field. In some instances just different assumptions regarding the math required to describe it.
In a previous post I said that the UFT I hold to does not require an "aether", then later I asked , does it "negate it?" It has been years since I have some read these cogent remarks, yet I recognize nearly all of them as rest stops along my own path... I have come to a place now where I content myself with a least this premise:
The Unified Field is comprehensible and expressible in terms of geometry, describing its spacial properties. These geometric properties describe (and/but may be responsible for some of) the actions occurring within the field, termed "forces", which act across the field at every scale.
These properties characterizing all space underly what I see as instantaneous action, but must therefore also define any "aether".
For me this aether persists in being a non-material entity... likewise gravitational and light vectors are non-material [in the traditional sense of gravitons or photons], yet I constantly ask myself, does it include "mass", "charge", electrons, neutrinos, (and other so-called fundamental particles of "matter") as well? Are these characteristics, and therefore the aether, "material" or "non-material", or is the distinction so blurred that this becomes unanswerable, or more trivially a matter of mere semantics? Or are there both materials and non-materials involved in the field dynamics at every scale? My basic and simple/simplistic answer is "force vectors", but is this just a semantic argument, or has it "substantial" merit? Pun also strictly intended.
Truth extends beyond the border of self-limiting science. Free discourse among opposing viewpoints draws the open-minded away from the darkness of inevitable bias and nearer to the light of universal reality.

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junglelord
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Re: Aether Linear Thread

Unread post by junglelord » Sat Jun 28, 2008 8:55 pm

The Negitive Sea of Energy. A must read by Dirac.
http://openseti.org/Docs/HotsonPart1.pdf

The Dirac sea is a theoretical model of the vacuum as an infinite sea of particles possessing negative energy. It was invented by the British physicist Paul Dirac in 1930 to explain the anomalous negative-energy quantum states predicted by the Dirac equation for relativistic electrons. The positron, the antimatter counterpart of the electron, was originally conceived of as a hole in the Dirac sea, well before its experimental discovery in 1932. Dirac, Einstein and others recognised that it is related to the 'metaphysical' aether
Preface
Dirac’s Equation has profound implications both for science
and for the search for new energy. If we continue to
use the wrong model (and the Standard Model is profoundly
wrong) we will continue to get confusing results
that are difficult to replicate.

The enclosure shows the nature of the energetic, nonstationary
aether that Einstein missed, that Dirac’s equation
demonstrates, and that Heisenberg and others
destroyed when they dismantled this equation. It further
suggests that special conditions, catalysis, and energy
available to a plasma may cause the synthesis, rather than
the release, of free neutrons, causing transmutations and
the release of energy via beta decay.

The treatment of Dirac’s equation is a lesson in the way
modern science works (or rather doesn’t). This treatment has
more recently been paralleled by the treatment of Reich,
Pons and Fleischmann, Halton Arp, and others. But I think
if one had to point to a single place where science went profoundly
and permanently off the track, it would be 1934 and
the emasculation of Dirac’s equation. This crisis at the heart
of science caused a chronic “hardening of the paradigm” and
science thereby lost the ability to self-correct.

Great scientists such as Einstein dedicated their
entire lives to unification. Nonetheless around that time the
simplifying trend reversed, and by the end of the century,
the accepted Standard Model (SM) of particle physics called
for around thirty-six “fundamental” particles, most with an
antiparticle, and each with its very own “field”: again almost
one hundred separate entities. What happened? William of
Ockham’s test would seem to indicate that science took a
very wrong turn sometime around 1932.

Well, perhaps the universe doesn’t shave with Ockham’s
razor—maybe it really is that complicated. But the evidence
points the other way. The universe exhibits very conspicuous
economy, even parsimony, of means. The DNA molecule, the
basis of life, is arguably the most complex entity known. Yet its
code is written using just four components, the four bases
whose combinations comprise the genetic code. It can be
shown by complexity theory that three bases would not provide
sufficient complexity for this code, and five would be
redundant. Yet any number of components could have been
used. However, only four are necessary, only four are used.
Further, all stable matter, including all of the chemical elements
and their compounds such as DNA, is built of just three
components—electron, proton, and neutron. Again only three
components are necessary, only three are used. Consider this
as a sequence, from more complex to less complex: four components
are both necessary and sufficient to build DNA, three
components are both necessary and sufficient to build all stable
matter. Does this suggest that to build these three components
would require thirty-six “fundamental” components, and
nearly one hundred entities? Surely not.

Going by the above sequence, we should instead consider
how many components are necessary to build electron, proton,
and neutron. And here the computer shows the way.
Computer science shows that operations of unlimited complexity
can be built up from just two binary components,
yes/no, on/off, plus/minus. Since two binary components are
all that is necessary, by Ockham’s razor and the universe’s
demonstrated parsimony, two binary components should be
sufficient.


The SM also has a major problem with mass. Gordon
Kane (1995) argues that the Standard Model should really
be called the “Standard Theory” because it is nearly perfect—
just a few minor flaws. He then goes on to mention
one of them (p. 117):

In its basic form, the Standard Theory is a theory for
massless particles. All the leptons, quarks, and bosons
must be particles without mass, or the mathematical
consistency of the theory is destroyed. The photon
and the gluons indeed have no mass, but the others
do. Why not just insert a mass for them in the equations?
Unfortunately, in a quantum theory all aspects
of physics are so highly interconnected that if the
masses are just put in, then calculations start to give
infinite values for many ordinary measurements. (In
the language of the last section of Chapter 4, the theory
is then not renormalizable.)

In other words, the Standard Theory is a beautiful theory—
but it applies to some other universe, one in which all particles
oblige the theorists by being massless. Unfortunately,
in our universe, the stubborn particles perversely persist in
having mass, while stubborn theorists persist in clinging to
a theory that treats them as if they didn’t. The current hope
is that two more fudged entities, the (unobserved) Higgs
field and its supposed quantum, the (unobserved) Higgs
boson, will somehow solve this dilemma.

The remaining above criteria (4-6) are also violated by the
SM, as will be shown in what follows. The roots of most of
these violations go back to the early 1930s as well. The infinities
that so plague the model, as we will demonstrate, also have
their origin in the early 1930s, in an apparently wrong turn
taken by science.

The Fork in the Road
By the above criteria, then, the SM would appear to fail in
nearly every possible way, and all of its failures seem to stem
from the early 1930s. By all indications science seems to
have taken a wrong turn about this time. After three hundred
years of progressively simplifying the description of the
universe, with fewer entities and simpler laws, it suddenly
turned the other way, with complexity and entities multiplying
like rabbits. (Quantum Field Theory [QFT] in the SM
is now so mathematically complex with its thirty-six or so
[unobserved] fields that, as Treiman [2000] puts it, “There
are no remotely realistic theories that are exactly soluble.”)
Science frequently makes choices between alternatives. Once
the choice is made, however, scientists tend to unify behind the
accepted alternative to the extent of denying and eventually
forgetting that there was any “real” choice made. Subsequent
textbooks gloss over any possible alternatives, depicting science
as a straightforward march up the one correct path toward
truth. Since it is forgotten and denied that such choices existed,
the results of these choices are rarely reviewed. Not only is there
no provision, or incentive, for such a review, there is positive,
and powerful, peer pressure against any such questioning of
basic premises. (The inexcusable treatment of the astronomer
Halton Arp [1998] is just one example.)

So stood the question in 1934. The Dirac equation was a
direct threat to the reigning paradigm. As Dirac noted,
physicists had always arbitrarily ignored the negative energy
solutions. If they were real in some sense, as Dirac insisted,
they had all been mortifyingly, catastrophically
wrong all these years, ignoring exactly half of reality.
And that other half of reality, alarmingly, seemed to resemble
the anathematized aether.

8-)
I think the two charge model of the subatomic units is supported by this paper. DNA is 4 base pairs comprised of 3 subatomic units, made of 2 charges each.
It also points out the problem of mass, and also the problem of ignoring half of everything, the aether.
If you only knew the magnificence of the 3, 6 and 9, then you would have a key to the universe.
— Nikola Tesla
Casting Out the Nines from PHI into Indigs reveals the Cosmic Harmonic Code.
— Junglelord.
Knowledge is Structured in Consciouness. Structure and Function Cannot Be Seperated.
— Junglelord

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