Extropia’s Curious Science: The Aether

EXTROPIA’S CURIOUS SCIENCE

‘The Aether’.

Wherever there are waves, there is usually a medium through which they travel. Sound waves, for example, result as a disturbance of air molecules. That’s why, in airless space, no-one can hear you scream (or any other sound for that matter).

You can, however, be seen and for many centuries this led people to believe that space could not be an empty void. This was because light travels in waves (electromagnetic waves to be precise) and it was thought that waves always required a medium. The medium through which light travelled was named the aether (or ether).

This line of reasoning (all waves require a medium, light is a wave, therefore light requires a medium) might seem like all the justification required for supposing the aether must exist. But, in science, an experiment that can falsify a theory trumps any supposition. So, an experiment was needed that would either support the theory or debunk it.

Such an experiment was undertaken in 1887 by two American physicists called Albert Michelson and Edward Morley. In order to detect the existence of the aether, they used a beam of light that was split in two, the two beams then sent on a journey toward two mirrors. One of those mirrors were set up so that the light beam travelling to it and bouncing back would be travelling in the same direction as the Earth as it travelled through space. Presuming the aether existed, the light beam and the Earth would be travelling through it as well. The other light beam travelled at right angles to the first.

(Image from Wikipedia)

The experiment was set up to ensure both beams travelled the same distance. But, assuming the Earth was travelling through the aether, it should have been the case that the time it took to complete their journeys would differ, and this would result in an interference pattern caused by the two beams getting out of step. If the pattern showed up, the aether had to exist.

But no such pattern was revealed. No matter how they rotated the apparatus, no matter what time of day or what season the experiment was carried out in, the pattern did not appear.

According to mainstream science, the Michelson-Morley experiment proved the aether does not exist. If this essay were devoted to mainstream science, it would no doubt go on to discuss Albert Einstein and his relativity theories. But this is fringe science we are interested in and so we are going to ask: Are we wrong to dismiss the existence of the aether?

The waves people are probably most familiar with are the sort that travel across the sea. Such waves obviously rely on a fluid medium. When it came to the aether, a fluid medium was ruled out. This was because light is a transverse wave. Why is that significant? Well, Einstein himself explained why in a speech he gave in 1920, titled ‘Ether and the Theory of Relativity’:

“It...seemed to be a necessary consequence of the fact that light is capable of polarisation that this medium, the ether, must be of the nature of a solid body, because transverse waves are not possible in a fluid, but only in a solid”.

When Michelson and Morley were conducting experiments designed to detect the aether, it was not any aether they were looking for. They did not even bother looking for the existence of a fluid medium through which light waves might travel, because it was believed transverse waves simply couldn’t exist in such a medium. Instead, the aether was presumed to be a solid with the elastic properties of steel, because nothing else could have accounted for the observed properties of electromagnetic waves. But, at the same time, all objects like you, me, and the Earth itself had to move through this solid aether as easily as ghosts passing through a wall.

At this point you might be thinking “well that’s just absurd. Thank goodness relativity theory did away with the aether all together”. But, then, Einstein’s theory is also pretty weird, as anyone who has scratched their head over the more bizarre elements of Christopher Nolan’s ‘Interstellar’ knows.

Had Einstein known about results obtained by physicists at Northwestern University in 1999, he might have proposed a different theory. According to a Science Daily report, those physicists:

“Have for the first time shown that superfluid helium-3...actually behaves like a solid in its ability to conduct sound waves. The finding, reported in the July 29 issue of Nature, is the first demonstration in a liquid of the ‘acoustic Faraday effect’, a response of sound waves to a magnetic field that is exactly analogous to the response of light waves to a magnetic field...it is significant as the first observation of a previously unknown mode of wave propagation in a liquid-one you would expect to see in a solid”.

As you may recall, the existence of a fluid aether was ruled out on the basis that transverse waves cannot travel through such a medium. But the findings of the Northwestern University physicists were that transverse waves have been observed in a superfluid.

Meanwhile, fringe scientists have pointed out similarities between famous equations and the properties of fluids. For example, Eric Lerner wrote in ‘The Big Bang Never Happened’:

“Since the 19th century it’s been recognised that the equations of electromagnetism are almost identical with the equations of hydrodynamics, the equations governing fluid flow. Even more curious, Schrodinger’s equation, the basic equation of quantum mechanics, is also closely related to equations of fluid flow”.

We humans devote a considerable portion of our brain’s processing power to the control of our hands and the sense of touch. Of all the forms matter comes in (plasma, liquid, gas, solid) it is solids that we can most easily manipulate with our hands. That may be part of the reason why, when we think about what everything is ultimately made of, we imagine fundamental building blocks, like the particles that make up the Standard Model.

But I have sometimes wondered what concepts dolphins would invent, were they capable of scientific inquiry. Being aquatic animals, would they naturally turn to the properties of fluids to explain the world around them? Would they know that transverse waves can exist in a superfluid and so, when they conceptualised an aether filling all of space, would it be a dynamic fluid that they set out to look for?

Were dolphin scientists to exist, they wouldn’t think much of the Michelson-Morley experiment and its strange suppositions. But they might well hold in high regard another experimenter who is unknown to most people. Dayton Miller ran experiments from 1906 through to the mid 1930s which strongly supported the existence of the aether. According to James DeMeo, “Dayton Miller’s 1933 paper in Reviews of Modern Physics details the positive results from over 20 years of experimental research into the question of ether-drift...today, however, Miller’s work is hardly known or mentioned”.

It could be that two of our most famous mainstream theories (Relativity and Quantum Physics) are so bizarre not because nature itself is bizarre, but because they are both based on the flawed assumption that there is no fluid aether. Here we might make a comparison to geocentric models of the solar system (ones that place the Earth at the centre rather than the sun) which required complex ‘epicycles’ in order to match observation with theory. Physicists like Eric Lerner have long maintained that Big Bang cosmology is not really successful at prediction, but rather at getting falsifying results that then lead to the theory being retrofitted so that it matches the data. Exotic forms of energy, invisible forms of matter, unknown particles, extra dimensions, whatever it takes to explain away what would otherwise be falsifying data. In his own words, “today’s cosmologists take the deductive method [which means beginning with assumptions of how things must have been and building a model from this imaginary beginning] as a rationalisation for clinging to long-disproven theories, modifying them into bizarre towers of ad hoc hypotheses and complexities”. Meanwhile, because proponents of Big Bang cosmology dominate peer-review groups and bodies that give out grants, anyone coming up with genuine alternatives find their results summarily dismissed and barely known in popular science circles. Not because nature disagrees with their theories, but simply because they do not conform to Big Bang orthodoxy.

Or maybe that’s just conspiracy theory talk and we should just trust that mainstream science has the answers?

REFERENCES

Science: A History by John Gribbin

‘Sorce Theory’ by Joel Morrison

‘The Big Bang Never Happened by Eric Lerner