Part IV: Ether it is or Ether it ain’t!?

            One of the great puzzles as to why our physicists set their foot on the wrong road to reason is situated in the history of theoretical physics versus experimental physics.  In theoretical physics you can make all kind of mistakes and simply change your mind, your theory and your philosophy and it doesn’t matter that much, but in experimental physics one must have a solid logic upon which to base the experiment because it has lasting effects.  This is the case in the history of the Ether.

            When Newton formulated his theory of light he used corpuscles, latter called quanta by Einstein, as the mode of delivery.  It was Thomas Young, known as phenomenon Young by his constituents and colleagues because he was a true genius, that advocated the concept of light traveling in waves and proved it through experiments.  (He was a true genius because he excelled in every endeavor he attempted; physician, physicist, linguist, Egyptologist, etc.)   This concept of light traveling in waves then set the stage for the next century of experimentalists trying to prove that there was something out there that had to wave.  Like waves traveling through water, which Young demonstrated in his experiment had great similarity to light waves, there must be something in which all planets and stars floated that transferred light from place to place and they called it Ether.

            This lead to nearly a century of trying to solve the Ether problem.  In 1878 Albert Michelson and Edward Morley, who were obsessed with measuring the speed of light, took up the challenge.  Assuming that the Earth like the stars and other planets floated in the Ether, they could find the speed of the Earth through the Ether by using an optical device they developed especially for the event.  It was called an interferometer.  The concept was by using mirrors they would split a beam of light and send one beam down one leg that was perpendicular to the other leg and a beam down the other leg and then bring them back together to see if they would interfere with one another.  The idea being that, since they had already measured the speed of light and found it to be constant, the beam would be foreshortened traveling into the Ether and elongated traveling away from the Ether.  They found no appreciable difference.  Because they could find no interference the assumption was made that the Ether did not exist and in 1905 when Einstein published his paper, ON THE ELECTRODYNAMICS OF MOVING BODIES, he put the death nail into the Ether concept when he called it “superfluous.”

            After the M-M experiment failed to find any interference fringes two great physicists tried to rescue the Ether theory by suggesting that the measuring instruments Michelson and Morley used contracted in the direction of the motion which rendered the null findings.  These two physicists were George Fitzgerald and Hendryk Lorentz.  They derived the now famous contraction equation of 1/ (1-v²/c²) which Einstein later used in his theory of special relativity.  He, of course, claimed he had no knowledge of this equation from Fitzgerald and Lorentz.

            Even after the publication of the original theory of relativity, H. A. Lorentz held since Einstein’s equation and his were the same it did not disprove that the Ether existed and continued to believe in it existence until he died.  And, in fact, there has never been any real proof that the Ether does not exist, but more evidence that it does.

            How can this be?  The fact is the fundamental logic on which the M- M experiment was based was flawed.  The experiment tested whether the Earth floated in the Ether as was the common consensus at the time.  This however assumed that the Earth and the Ether were separate phenomenon, like an airplane flying through the air or a boat traveling through the water.  We know this because the M-M experiment was always done parallel to the surface of the Earth just like an air speed indicator on an airplane or a knots indicator on a boat, and it is still done that way today.  It never approached the concept of Rene Descartes’ idea that all mass was a vortex in space, similar to a tornado in the air or a maelstrom in the water.  If it had it would have tested the split beam not only parallel to the surface to the Earth but also perpendicular as well.

            The main reason no one accepted Descartes’ vortex concept was because Newton did not believe in it.  In his PRINCIPIA DE MATHEMATICA, Newton was able to explain all the orbital motions of the planets in our solar system with his gravitational equation; and, therefore, he thought the vortex concept unnecessary.  He could explain all the orbital motions except one.  Newton’s equation could not explain the precession of Mercury’s orbit around the Sun, but it took Einstein a while to figure that out.

            There are two reasons Newton did not support Descartes’ concept of vortexes in space.  One was because as we stated above he thought it unnecessary and secondly because Newton’s concept of space was, “…without regard to anything external, remains always similar and immovable.”  Although Einstein was more in agreement with Newton, the general theory actually is more in support of Descartes’ concept.  Einstein saw mass as curving space and time in its local vicinity, in other words causing a kind of vortex wherever mass was present.

            It is unfortunate that the M-M experiment has been touted as the greatest failed experiment in history and still remains the experiment that disproved the existence of the Ether, because it did not.  What it did do is set the speed of light as the standard of measure for all speeds in the universe.  It failed because of two reasons.  First, as we have said it was based upon an incomplete premise and it never fully explored the possibility of light travel perpendicular to the Earth’s surface and secondly it had two way travel.  Supposedly they tried to account for this but never considered the fact that the energy gain in one direction would be loss on the return direction or vise versa.

  

            If one has read THE UNIVERSE IN A NUTSHELL by Stephen Hawking one can understand why physicists still labor under this misconception.  On page 7 he has a depiction of the M-M experiment in pictures.  It is not the depiction of the M-M experiment, but rather a depiction of the Pound-Rebka Experiment of 1959.  In his depiction he has the arrows centered above the Earth on the Earth’s axis perpendicular to one another, but if one sinks the apex of these arrows to the center of the Earth then the test is perpendicular to the surface of the Earth.  The M-M experiment has always been parallel with or tangent to the Earth’s surface.  It was not until 1959 that Robert Pound and Glen Rebka, Jr. was testing the time dilation effect of general relativity using the Mossbauer Effect that a test perpendicular to Earth’s surface was performed.  It proved to be very successful.

            The only true way to determine whether the Ether really exists is to combine the two experiments and see if there is an interference or temporal difference at the point where the two experiments coincide.  We know the M-M experiment will remain constant because it has remained so in every test to date, but the P-R experiment should show a variation as the Earth rotates on its axis or orbits the Sun.

            Whoops, what am I saying?  We already do this.  It is called the Ground Positioning System or GPS for short.  There are thirty-one of these cesium atomic clock satellites orbiting the Earth and, six positions on the ground and six shared throughout the world.  These clocks communicate with one another constantly to give positional data for any GPS system.  The way they work is by comparing motional time dilation (slowing down time) with positional time dilation.  Positional time dilation or what is called gravitational or proper time dilation is different for each atomic clock depending how deep or shallow it is in the gravity well.  By this I mean that the greater the gravity potential or higher the clock is in orbit the more near normal the clock runs and the lower the potential or nearer to Earth the clock is the slower it runs.  (This is the general relativity part.) Then you add to that the linear translation or motional time dilation, east, south, north or west, you can locate any moving object on Earth.  (This is the special relativity part.)  The interesting thing about the ground cesium atomic clocks is that they have to be recalibrated constantly because they fluctuate by the amount of ±0.00166067 seconds per year due to the Earth’s orbit around the Sun.  This sounds like a solid comparison between the Michelson-Morley and the Pound-Rebka experiments and pretty darn Ethereal to me.

            Descartes saw space as an extension of mass and mass as a vortex in the Ether that permeated the universe.  Newton saw space as unaffected by anything always similar and immovable.  Einstein saw space and time as independent from every thing else but curved by the locality of mass.  Although no scientist today believes the Ether exists we see our Moon orbit our Earth, our Earth orbiting in our Solar system, our Solar system orbiting in its galaxy.  (It completes its 26,000 year orbit on Dec. 21, 2012, as known to the Mayans.)  We see galaxies affecting other galaxies and we just call it the gravitational influence.  But the truth is gravitational energy is most probably the Ethereal energy from which all neutral mass is made.  The combination of gravitational energy and electromagnetic energy is actually the fabric of space, time and all mass.

In the general theory Einstein used the concept of gravitational energy as a part of the total energy of the solar system; …For if we consider a complete system (e.g. the solar system), the total mass of the system, and therefore its total gravitating action as well, will depend on the total energy of the system, and therefore on the ponderable energy together with the gravitational energy.  The only problem was that Einstein still considered ponderable mass to be wholly electromagnetic in nature and gravity to be a separate energy due to spatial distortion from the mass.

            I stand on the side of Descartes and Lorentz and James Clerk Maxwell who formulated the unified equations for electromagnetism and believed in vortexes and the Ether as do the aliens.  We call it gravitation but the truth is it is the fabric of all neutral mass and all space in the universe is simply an extension of a loosely packed mass; no mass, no space.

            Later we will discuss black holes, wormholes, the Copenhagen interpretation, the uncertainty principle, the cat in the box and other strange and wonderful inventions of theoretical physics.