Re: Aether is the empty space in which the Universe sits

From: Patrick Reany (reany_at_asu.edu)
Date: 09/09/04 

Date: 9 Sep 2004 12:55:47 -0700

Paul Stowe <ps@acompletelyjunkaddress.net> wrote in message news:<6q3vj0devpr16cr3u37mpa0g88e33smh9i@4ax.com>...
> On 8 Sep 2004 11:51:00 -0700, reany@asu.edu (Patrick Reany) wrote:
>
> >Paul Stowe <ps@acompletelyjunkaddress.net> wrote in message news:<k9fsj05chq44c7keq6lc0th0rtm7ivk7d4@4ax.com>...
> >> On 7 Sep 2004 12:46:47 -0700, reany@asu.edu (Patrick Reany) wrote:
> >>
>
> [Snip...]
>
> >>>
> >>> Einstein told us in what sense he meant "ether." He meant merely a
> >>> space-filling "thing,"

I am going to snip out any of your reply, Paul, to me that went off
topic. My reply to you concerned Einstein's view of ether. Your
changing the topic to "real ether," "reality," or anything else is
removed.

> >>
> >> a.k.a. a 'physical medium'...

You'll have to define precisely what you mean by 'physical medium'.

> >>
> >>> but NOT a material or mechanical thing.
> >>
> >> Quote please. He does talk about the historical aspects. But where
> >> does HE say this? He does say,
> >>
> >> "More careful reflection teaches us, however, that the
> >> special theory of relativity DOES NOT compel us to deny
> >> ether. We may assume the existence of an ether,; only
> >> we must give up ascribing a definite state of motion to
> >> it, ..."
> >
> > I already explained. There are an infinite number of models of ether,

Note that Einstein said "an ether." There are an infinite number (at
least 15) one could freely invent. The point is that the ether concept
is NOT uniquely defined from experiment alone.

> > as a space-filling "thing." Maxwell's ether and Einstein's ether share
> > that and an intersection of predictions, but not the same "metaphysics."
>
> And the essential difference in metaphysics is ...???

You disobeyed me and refused to read "Physics and Reality," right?
Field is irreducible, for the last time, to Einstein. If you are so
thick-headed that you still don't get it, then I give up on you as a
hopeless moron. Irreducible means not reducible to anything else,
including to matter.

I'll try to give you one more example of the diference between matter
and field, according to Einstein. according to Einstein according to
Einstein according to Einstein according to Einstein according to
Einstein according to Einstein!!!!!

>From Infeld's book _Quest_ (p. 255-257), we read Infeld's account of
the lecture Einstein gave him at their first meeting in 1936 at
Princeton:

       There are two fundamental concepts in the development
     of physics: _field_ and _matter_. The old physics which developed
     from Galileo and Newton, up to the middle of the nineteenth
     century, is a physics of matter. The old mechanical point of
     view is based upon the belief that we can explain all
     phenomena in nature by assuming particles and simple forces
     acting among them....For the physicists of the nineteenth
     century, to explain meant to form a mechanical picture from
     which the phenomena could be deduced.

That was the rise of the mechanical view. Next came its eventual
decline:

       Through slow, painful struggle and progress the mechanical
     view broke down. It became apparent that the simple concepts
     of particles and forces are not sufficient to explain all
     phenomena of nature. As so often happens in physics, in
     the time of need and doubt, a great new idea was born: that
     of the field.....The transition from particle physics to field
     physics is undoubtedly one of the greatest, and, as Einstein
     believes, _the_ greatest step accomplished in the history
     of human thought.

FYI, Einstein was not only NOT interested in treating fields as
reducible to material particles, he was actually interested in
reducing particles to accumulation points in fields.

>
> Define mechanics...

Since I always define the terms I use which are not primitive, that
makes me about the only one who'll do so here. You rarely do. You only
pretend to know what you mean by the words you use.

Mechanics is that study in physics that has four irreducible elements
in it by which phenomena are accounted for:

1) point mass particle,
2) inertial frame,
3) forces acting at a distance, and
4) absolute acceleration space (which is related to the
   inertial frame in a specific way).

That by itself is just a framework. At least one specific force law
must be given to have a theory of mechanics. For more on this, see
pp299-300 and

     The first attempt to lay a uniform theoretical foundation
     was the work of Newton. In his system everything is reduced
     to the following concepts:

      (1) Mass points with invariable mass;
      (2) action at a distance between any pair of mass points;
      (3) law of motion for the mass point.
          --- Einstein, THE FUNDAMENTS OF THEORETICAL PHYSICS,
              Ideas and Opinions, p.325

     The emancipation of the field concept from the assumption of
     its association with a mechanical carrier finds a place among
     the psychologically most interesting events in the development
     of physical thought. During the second half of the nineteenth
     century, in connection with the researches of Faraday and
     Maxwell, it became more and more clear that the description
     of electromagnetic processes in terms of field was vastly
     superior to a treatment on the basis of the mechanical concepts
     of material points. By the introduction of the field concept in
     electrodynamics, Maxwell succeeded in predicting the existence
     of electromagnetic waves, the essential identity of which with
     light waves could not be doubted, if only because of the equality
     of their velocity of propagation. As a result of this, optics
     was, in principle, absorbed by electrodynamics. One psychological
     effect of this immense success was that the field concept
     gradually won greater independence from the mechanistic framework
     of classical physics.
       --- Einstein, Ideas and Opinions, Relativity and the Problem
           of Space, p. 368.

     Since the special theory of relativity revealed the physical
     equivalence of all inertial systems, it proved the
     untenability of the hypothesis of an ether at rest. It was
     therefore necessary to renounce the idea that the
     electromagnetic field is to be regarded as a state of a
     material carrier. The field thus becomes an irreducible
     element of physical description, irreducible in the same
     sense as the concept of matter in the theory of Newton.
       --- Einstein, Ideas and Opinions, Relativity and the Problem
           of Space, p. 371.

         There seems to be only one way out of all these
     difficulties. In the attempt to understand the phenomena
     of nature from the MECHANICAL POINT OF VIEW,
     throughout the whole development of science up to the
     twentieth century, it was necessary to introduce artificial
     substances like electric and magnetic fluids, light corpuscles,
     or ether. The result was merely the concentration of all
     the difficulties in a few essential points, such as ether
     in the case of optical phenomena. Here all the fruitless
     attempts to CONSTRUCT AN ETHER in some simple way,
     as well as the other objections, seem to indicate that the
     fault lies in the fundamental assumption that it is possible to
     explain all events in nature from a MECHANICAL
     POINT OF VIEW. Science did not succeed in carrying
     out the MECHANICAL PROGRAM convincingly,
     and today no physicist believes in the possibility of its
     fulfillment.
     [Found in: The Evolution of Physics, p. 120-121. emphasis mine.]

>
> > And go get Einstein's book Ideas and Opinions and read his essay "Physics
> > and Reality." Then come back and you can talk intelligently for A CHANGE.
>
> Just did, and your point is what?

Read it again! It didn't sink in much. You didn't know what mechanics
is from it.

>
> Nature determines what's in or out, we just get to try to understand it...

We're not talking about Nature; we're talking about what the concept
of "ether" meant to Einstein, or have you forgotten already?

[snip]

>
> > ... In addition to the mass point and its motion, there arose according
> > to Faraday's concept a new kind of physical reality, namely, the "field."
>
> Please reference me to where Faraday suggested a 'field'. In fact,
> Faraday advocated 'lines of force' known today to be perfectly analogous
> to fluidic streamlines...

Again, unless you're willing to reduce lines of force to matter,
you're talking about what came to be called "field."

> Sorry Patrick, Einstein was just a man, not
> God, his words are inviolate. But what I'm discussing IS the physical
> charactertistics of that space-filling thing which, amazingly, has all
> the same characteristics of a medium. THat WAS Einstein's point.

I don't give a damn what you're trying to morph the topic into. I'm
only talking about what Einstein thought about ether, whether he was
right or wrong historically about Faraday. But don't easily think he
was wrong about such things.

[snip]
>
> > people gradually got used to the idea of regarding the "electromagnetic
> > field" as the final irreducible constituent of physical reality.
>
> They settled for a placeholder in the absence of sufficent knowledge.
> That's fine as long as one realizes and remembers this fact.

Well, that's my point about what Einstein did. Period. Whether he was
right or wrong to do so in your eyes.

>
> > We have H. Hertz to thank for definitely freeing the concept of the
> > field from all encumbrances derived from the conceptual armory of
> > mechanics, ...
>
> I'd say we have Hertz to BLAME...

Bingo!
>
> > ... and H. A. Lorentz for freeing it from a material substratum;

Bingo!

[snip]
>
> >--- In: THE MECHANICS OF NEWTON AND THEIR INFLUENCE ON THE DEVELOPMENT
> >OF THEORETICAL PHYSICS, Ideas and Opinions, p 259.
> >
> > Einstein had early on rejected mechanics as a basis for all of physics!
[snip]
>
> I agree with Einstein's observation on the aether,
>
> "But this ether may not be thought of as endowed with the
> quality characteristic of ponderable matter, as consisting
> of parts which may be tracked through time."
>
> The aether is not, nor was it ever, 'Ponderable Matter'!

Then what is it? Matter? Field? Something else? That's the damn point
Einstein made in the evolution of physics. You have ONLY those TWO
choices, so which is it?

>
> >> Which, by definition, IS Maxwell & Lorentz's aether... Note where hes
> >> says, "were modelled on the Maxwell-Lorentz theory".
> >
> > What are you talking about?
>
> If you 'extend' someone else's model you, by definition inherit the
> 'base class' model.

Einstein did NOT "extend" (i.e., generalize) Maxwell-Lorentz theory.
He adapted it to his own personal formal (relativistic) point of view.
I keep telling you that.

[snip]

>
> Yup, just like the 'field' concept WAS developed as a placeholder to
> do exactly the same for the physical medium.

Field is NOT matter, in Einstein's formal point of view. To Einstein
field is irreducible. Period!!!

[snip]
>
> > From "Physics and Reality," 1936, p. 302:
> >
> > A second method of application of mechanics, which
> > avoids the consideration of a subdivision of matter
> > down to "real" material points, is the mechanics of
> > so-called continuous media. This mechanics is
> > characterized by the fiction that the density and the
> > velocity of matter depend continuously upon coordinates
> > and time, and that the part of the interactions not
> > explicitly given can be considered as surface forces
> > (pressure forces) which again are continuous functions
> > of position. Herein we find the hydrodynamic theory,
> > and the theory of elasticity of solid bodies. These
> > theories avoid the explicit introduction of material
> > points by fictions which, in the light of the foundation
> > of classical mechanics, can only have an approximate
> > significance.
>
> Just like modernists avoid the explicit introduction of the
> aetherial medium by fictions (Fields) which, in light of
> the foundation of kinetic theory, can only have an approximate
> significance... :)

I call your aetherial medium just as big a fiction!

> THus these cannot properly account for
> the granularity that underpins all continuum models. Take
> you level of investigations to small enough scales (regions)
> and your field approximation goes to ***.

Once again, you've gone off topic. All I'm interested in is how
Einstein viewed ether.

Patrick

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