Aether has got to be the biggest bugaboo in the history of the examination of physical reality, and although absent from discussion the past century, is springing alive once again to spread its ignorance.
Aristotle apparently started the ball rolling when he set out to explain the orderly circular motion of the stars in the sky. Circular motion did not exist naturally on Earth, so this circular motion must be due to something that is not on Earth. The stars must be embedded in something that keeps their motion going in regular circles. He used the then Greek word for "always running" to name the substance in which the stars were embedded aei thein. That, of course, makes Aristotle the world's first empirical scientist. He's clearly using the basic empirical methodology of monkey see, monkey say.
Most accounts of Aristotle's aei thein are today corrupted by an interpretation handed down several centuries later by the philosopher Apollonius. He relates that there are the four elements defined by Aristotle, water, air, earth and fire, and a fifth, ether (bad translation, I guess) of which the gods are made. Just as mortal creatures inhale air, immortals inhale ether. I suppose it's logical, what with the gods living above the clouds and all. More modern interpretation personifies aether as Aether, heaven, son of Erebus, the god of darkness dwelling in the underworld. Hey, science has always been religion, as evidenced by the empirical religion of today (see the last column).
That's where things rested as the world sank into the Dark Age and knowledge was lost, only to be rediscovered by the west in the Renaissance, with Aristotle's aether now the substance that filled space. Well, Newton had his planets moving through frictionless space, so what do you think he thought about aether? You guessed it, aether didn't exist. To make his point, he quoted Plato, who claimed that Socrates believed space was empty. Of course, Aristotle was Plato's student and disagreed with just about everything he said. But the 17th Century scholars were trying to get rid of Aristotle because of his central part in the Earth as the center of the universe mistake.
But there's more story to Newton and the aether. Huygens originally proposed the wave theory of light, and strangely enough, Hooke agreed. When Newton proposed his theory of light to the Royal Society, his theory, that white light was made up of all colors and ordered the way it came out of a prism, had light as a particle rather than a wave. This produced the dispute with Hooke that would result in Newton's lifelong animosity to Hooke and the subsequent denigration of Hooke's achievements after his death when Newton took over the Royal Society. The fact that Newton held the dominant position in science after becoming President of the Society led to the eclipse of Huygens' wave theory of light.
The funny thing about all this is, Newton was right about light. In fact, it was the only thing he was ever right about. So what do you think an empirical science that was in the process of putting the universe together backwards would do with something that was right, even if it was Newton's? Get rid of it, of course. Thus at the beginning of the 19th Century, and that was only two centuries ago, Young performed what's now known as his two-slit experiment, the results of which were taken to prove conclusively that light is a wave. See column 09-04. The analogy was to water waves that really don't exist except as a disturbance of a medium, the water, so if light was a wave, it also needed a medium. The goal may well have been to discredit Aristotle, but the only medium around was Aristotle's aether, so all of a sudden, Young's experiment became proof of the existence of the aether.
That's where matters rested until the Michelson Morley experiment. Looking over past articles, I'm amazed I've mentioned this experiment in nine columns without devoting a column to it. The long and short of it is, the experiment was designed to use the aether to measure the speed and direction the Earth was traveling, a feat I accomplish mathematically on the cover of the first volume of The Copernican Series, At the Gates of the Citadel and you can see at The Copernican Series , just click on consequences at the top of the page. The Michelson Morley apparatus was designed to split a beam of light and send it at ninety-degree angles, recollect it and use Young's interference patterns to produce a result. The idea was, with the Earth moving in the aether, the light traveling across the aether would arrive at a different time than the light moving against the aether, and the extent of the interference patterns would indicate the speed. The apparatus was built so it could rotate in a plane, and rotating the plane would indicate the direction the Earth was traveling in.
The result? Well, no matter which way they rotated the apparatus, the interference patterns remained unchanged.
Now let's use a little logic here. Young analogized the interference patterns produced by his two-slit experiment as the interference two water waves produce when they meet one another, with the troughs canceling out the crests to produce water at its normal level. Of course, there is more than one interpretation for the interference patterns, especially with today's knowledge, but what the heck, once empirical science determines something, it's like a hungry dog with a bone, it ain't going to let go. So, the interference patterns prove light is a wave and because light is a wave, they also prove the existence of the aether. Michelson and Morley come along and prove there is no aether. What's the logical conclusion? That light is not a wave and there must be some other explanation for the interference patterns.
What does empirical science conclude? There is an aether, light is a wave, so the dimensions of the equipment were changing.
Can you get that?
The failed experiment didn't fail, it proved that matter changes its dimensions with speed, a new fact it called the Fitzgerald-Lorentz contraction, later embodied in Einstein's theories, an Einstein who sometimes acknowledged the aether (1921) and sometimes didn't (1905, probably as a result of his theories attempting to account for the Michelson Morley failure by having it both ways, there was no aether, but time and matter expanded and contracted with speed), but who also proved that light was a particle. Maxwell was the reason that aether became superfluous. He created a set of rather simple equations that dealt with what has become defined as the electromagnetic spectrum, the spectrum being a misleading reference to light as a wave and thus requiring an aether. However, the equations did clarify the range of electromagnetic frequencies that were increasingly becoming measurable, although to this day, empirical science holds on to the white light is made up of all colors mistake even though colors are individual frequencies and to believe that the group of frequencies we see as color are bundled up into one frequency in the range of electromagnetic frequencies is plain stupidity.
Although no one today can explain how the electric and magnetic features of these emissions are propelled through space, the implication is the interaction of the two is what does the job. It sort of made the aether useless and it simply became a topic of speculation as the gigantic mistake of quantum mechanics began to roll through the 20th Century. Quantum mechanics, of course, is an attempt to explain what should have been the starting point. When Huygens starting claiming light was a wave and Newton started claiming it was a particle, both missed the primary question: How does matter produce light when it undergoes combustion? To answer this question, you have to have a consistent concept of what matter is and a concept of light consistent with the concept of matter. You don't start answering questions about the end of a process, you ask it about the beginning of a process. No one, until Einstein discovered the photoelectric effect, even bothered to connect light with its source, and to this day empirical science claims that light is not produced in the process we see with our very eyes by looking up at the sky and seeing the sun sitting there producing light as it is undergoing the process of field replacement (see column 08-05).
Comes the 20th Century, when somebody thinks to ask the basic question, the first question that should have been asked, the potential answers to which control everything else, and what do we have, an empirical science that already knows everything there is to know about light. It knows everything there is to know about matter. Hey, these things have already been determined over the centuries of deep thinking, now all we have to do is fit the two together.
Of course, they don't fit. You have an atom which is jury-rigged with weak and strong forces and electrons that whiz around with no apparent means of propulsion. You have light that you already determined is a wave, but which is a particle, so which must be a wave particle. Instead of starting from the beginning, empirical science built the beginning with a bunch of misshapen blocks that couldn't possibly fit together. So what do they come up with? As I've said in the past, I can never keep it straight, but these electrons, with no visible means of propulsion, jump up and down in their orbits producing and absorbing packets that are electromagnetic emissions.
Now doesn't that make a lot of sense to us all? Well, it doesn't have to make sense because empirical science simply points to the atomic bomb as proof of the validity of quantum mechanics. However, the Manhattan Project that produced the atom bomb was a gigantic trial and error operation spanning many states, employing thousands of people, costing what would be billions today, and believe me, if any two of the scientists working on the project could agree on the underlying theory, it's not documented. There were always disputes about why something worked like it did, and right up to the first explosion, the theory was so abstruse that half the scientists thought the atmosphere would explode.
It's just another case of empirical science claiming their theory produced technology when it had nothing whatsoever to do with the technology. The dozens of traitors passing information to the Soviets were not passing theoretical papers, they were passing diagrams of technology.
The existence of the aether, on the other hand, remained an amusing speculation. For instance, Dirac, a theoretician so incomprehensible, he is considered an empirical genius, said (Nature, vol 168, p 906) "We can now see (see?) that we may very well have an aether, subject to quantum mechanics and conformable to relativity, provided we are willing to consider (willing to consider, this is science?) a perfect vacuum as an idealized state, not attainable in practice." If anyone can tell me what the heck this means in the real world, I'd be interested to hear it.
Empirical science, to maintain its momentum, read keep the bucks coming in, passed into the realm of science fiction sometime in the 20th Century and it's never looked back. Now, with incomprehensible nonsense like string theory, just about anything goes, and apparently, anything comes back. One of the things that's making a big comeback is, you guessed it, the aether. When we ignore the basic questions concerning our reality, the cause of motion, the connection of light to matter, when we just name things, light is a photon, gravity is a property, electricity is a moving charge, magnetism is, well, something, when we engage in monkey see, monkey say empirical science, we go absolutely nuts when we are naming things that aren't even there.
The first thing we are naming is energy that isn't there. In column 08-04 I discuss over unity, the idea that we can get more energy out of, well, it must be there, so we can get it. Over unity, the attempt to produce engines that produce more energy than they use, has been a panacea for centuries, the classic attempt at producing a perpetual motion machine (although empirical science appears to have done so with its picture of the solar system). Now comes the concept of Zero Point Energy and the Zero Point Field, ZPE and ZPF respectively. This is the new aether.
So what is this new aether? First, it needs to be "something" that doesn't provide any hindrance to the movement of the planets. Got that? Something, i.e., something that actually exists, but that something that exists cannot create friction. Well, what would the physical nature of that "something" be?
Well, it turns out, that "something" is a superfluid substance that constitutes physical space itself. Huh? Space, it seems, is the absence of matter, but here it becomes physical matter, and a fluid at that. What type of fluid would not produce friction, resistance to the movement of objects, the planets, in it?
Well, it turns out it's a truly perfect fluid. What's a truly perfect fluid? One that provides no resistance to the movement of the planets.
This is perfect empirical science. What is gravity? A property of mass. What is mass? That which produces gravity.
My point is, when we don't ask the right questions, we don't get the right answers. If we then believe those answers to be laws, the answers to other questions we ask will be distorted by the incorrect answers we accept as fact. Empirical science is so for down the rabbit hole, it is simply babbling, and that opens the door for all sorts of babbling as the original babbling ripples out into the empirical community.
Thus, with relativity and quantum mechanics, we get a solution to the time traveler's paradox. Didn't know time travel was possible? Well, according to empirical science, it is. Just because it's science fiction doesn't mean it isn't serious business. After all, science fiction writers only made about three cents a word off it when it was dreamed up, although H.G. Wells did very well, but empirical scientists can turn it into huge salaries, grants, courses and even departments, awards, journals, anything that can generate income, take a buck out of our pockets under the pretense that something is being done that, while we don't understand it, is simply marvelous.
The time traveler's paradox goes something like this: "Some" "solutions" to Einstein's general theory of relativity permit time travel. As every knave knows, space, which is nothing, and time, which doesn't exist other than as a measure of the movement of matter, when combined, produce space time, which then can curve back on itself permitting, on a theoretical basis, someone to step across the curve back into the past. Now that's totally clear, and because it is permitted mathematically, it becomes a serious topic of interest for empirical science.
The problem is, what if someone stepped across the curvature in space and met a younger version of himself, altering the past so that the present is affected. What if that traveler accidentally killed himself? Who then would be doing the killing?
Not to worry. Quantum mechanics, the silly notion that orbiting electrons jump up in down in orbit to produce light, would prevent this from happening. You see, empirical science can confirm time travel because waves actually flow into the past. Not quite Einstein, but close enough for empirical work. "Analyzing" these waves as they flow back in time, empirical science discovered that they interfere destructively (remember Young's two-slit experiment) and therefore time travelers would only see alternatives consistent with the world they left behind. I'm not sure what this means, but it might mean that the alternate of accidentally killing himself would not be visible because it isn't consistent with the world he left behind and therefore would not be possible. This from the 6//12/05 issue of New Scientist.
The problem with this is, it ripples out to the general public where egotistic individuals learn to recite it by rote so at bars and dinner parties they can message their egos by claiming to know the secrets of the universe. The rest of us simply sit there, dumb, ignorant, and willingly paying out billions of dollars for total nonsense. Some do get it, however. In the current season of South Park, the raunchy Comedy Central libertarian program, the boys spy the girls using what in my youth was called a cootie catcher, a piece of paper folded in such a way that it opens several different ways. Searching it on the net, I see South Park was actually mimicking its current use, which is "Predict the Future: Girl Power." In this use, numbers and colors are put on the closed portions and are revealed when those portions are opened after a question about the future. The guys see the girls predict the future and believe that they have obtained advanced technology. They set about to steal that technology.
The analogy to the girls predicting the future is empirical science spending vast amounts of money attempting to demonstrate we can travel into the past.
Do we really want to squander our resources on a grade school game when we haven't addressed the basic questions of our reality?
Peter Bros is the author of the 9 volume Copernican Series and is President of The Far Museum of Dallas, an actual history museum, which will house its collection of 50,000 rare Eastern Mediterranean manuscripts and artifacts together with actual history displays and tours in a full-sized replica of the Egyptian Temple at Dendera to be built in the Dallas Ft. Worth area. Email:peterbros@therealskeptic.com