In the January/February ANALOG magazine, Jeffrey Kooistra presents some interesting support for the theory of a fluid model of space/time, as a few physicists are currently raising. Starngely enough, it comes for the one person who supposedly enitrely removed the concept of the Aether ( The non-luminous 'fluid medium' in which light waves propagate )- Albert Einstein.
The neeed for this medium to exist was based upon Einstein's interpretation of "Handbook Of Optics" by P Drude, who badly distorted the theory of Lorentz's view of the concept; Drude claimed that Lorentz saw the aether as being an actual mass at absolute rest, which would not have allowed light to be a constant as Einstein based Rleativity upon, but Lorentz actually claimed that " ( Aether has ) some parts . . . remaining at rest with respect to one another, and that the aether at rest constituted a priviledged reference system."
However, in 1916, Einstein and Lorentz entered into correspondence, during the course of which the former began to realise that there was a way that an aether could fit with Relativity; To quote 'Einstein And The Ether' by Ludwick Kostro, "For the first time, however, there emerged a concept of a new, non-stationary aether which would not violate the relativity principle." In fact Kostro quotes Einstein from a deleted section of an article for 'Nature' in 1920 "Therefore, 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 is still permissible, as before, to introduce a medium filling space and to assume that the electromagnetic fields (and matter as well) are its states."
So, why does he not mention the aether specifically after 1920? Firstly, he did: read the Leyden lecture of 1920 at link and especially the phrases "As to the part the new ether will play in physics in the future we do not know. We know it determines the metrical relationshisp in the space/time continuum . . . but we do not know whether it has an essential share in the structure of elementary particles . . it would be a great advance if we could (understand)the gravitational field and the electromagnetic field together as one unified conformation."
Secondly, the politics of the time was still smarting from the influence of the Nazi regime, and the aether was used by the Nazis as an alternative to so-called Semitic physics; One notable work 'The Ether As the Foundation of A Unified Cosmology' by Cristoph Schrempf pointed out the correctness of National Socialism by the occurence in nature of vortexes that resemble swastikas (They do exist, especially in certain cloud patterns, and may have inspired their use as symbols ). Scientists such as Phillipp Lenard attacked the idea of an non-aether theory on arguments bordering on anti-semitic. So the return to the aether by Einstein would have been seen in many circles as the opposite vice. Probably due to this, Einstein preffered to use such terms as 'physical space' or 'total field' rather than aether . . .
Finally, the implication this creates is summed up by Einstien in the quote from the 'Nature' article "The Concept Of Space"; "We have now to come to the conclusion that space is the primary thing and matter only secondary . . ." which as Kooistra argues opens the way for matter and all phenomena to be interpreted in terms of fliud dynamics.
Hope that this has been a more interesting description of the concept than I have managed to explain before.
thanks you for your donations.
