Re: The Aether and Being

On Nov 12, 5:10 am, Tenifer <tensorsur...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Nov 11, 11:20 pm, Laurent <cyberd...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:





On Nov 10, 8:39 am, Tenifer <tensorsur...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

On Nov 10, 7:38 pm, Laurent <cyberd...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

That which is needs to be something eternal, immutable and absolute,
with no beginning and no end. For that to be possible there needs to
be no motion, therefore, no time. Matter is then, ruled out. Matter is
what it is, only at present. Neither the past, nor the future exists
as matter. The Real, absolute matter, as Hegel called it, is the
Aether.

Considering that matter is made of fields, that if there were no
fields there would be no universe, then we could safely say that all
objects that exist as matter are little more than apparitions whose
being is given to them only temporarily. If you stop an atom from
spinning, it disintegrates.

I say 'given to them' because they all exist within that which is.
They are thanks to the aether they come from. If you are because of
the aether, then your being comes from the aether. But you, the
biological unit, because of the rules that govern matter, are only for
a short period of time. There is no death, only renewal.

And if matter is because of the aether, then matter does what the
aether wants. And what matter wants? Just look at living matter... all
it wants is to continue to exist, as efficiently as possible. What the
aether wants is what matter does, that's why matter follows a
preferred time line.

Aether means maker, or, the fire that builds.

--
Laurent

Hey dude. Don't create new definition of aether. Aether is the alleged
medium of light which relativity has exorcised already a century ago.
Create a new word. If you won't. Then you won't make sense and
would look drunk or high on coke. Replace the word Aether with
the Primary Existence, The Core, the Matrix Field, etc. and you
would make sense. Continue being attached to "Aether" and
you'd grow white hair achieving nothing....

te

Aether is the proper term, look it up in a good dictionary or
encyclopedia. It is the term used by Einstein in the books and essays
he wrote on the subject decades after his GTR. As he said - it isn't a
mathematical need, it is a philosophical need we have in order to
explain objective reality. IOW, you can have QED without aether, but
you won't ever resolve the God issue without it.

Einstein is not the authority now. Einstein was also stubborn.
Einstein didn't want to believe in QM, he didn't want to
believe in black holes. His last 40 years was to create a
Unified Theory without QM. So you can't take his word
about aether, etc.

Also aether is in essence about substance. Since your
philosophical rumbling is about what lies behind substance.
Then aether is a wrong concept to use. You'll just create
a mountain of semantics mismatch in your communication.
The world would only accept possibility of aether if relativity
was emperically falsified. Without this. Aether is as good as
stuff that belongs to the waste basket. Don't be so
attached to words. This is the problems with religions
where they put the world in flames over mere words
and semantic battle.

Keep your common sense intact dude. Don't be lost
like so many..

Te





Neither science, nor the universe cares about what those things mean
to man. To understand and/or explain reality, you must look at it in
an objective way. And the facts say, the Aether... God... Mind...
Consciousness... is just a thing with no purpose. It can't neither
see, nor think. We see and think for it... and we like it and want to
continue. It is driven by a hunger, an urge to continue to exist, to
order reality, to preserve and gather information (DNA). This is why
Nature follows a preferred time line, it's called syntropy.

God (Aether) is Spirit, Will without purpose... pure energy... and
Christians, Jews and Muslims are killing other because each one of
them thinks they got it, that they know the way... when in reality,
science is the only way.

Aether is the physicalists' God.

--
Laurent- Hide quoted text -

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Einstein's Ether:

Why did Einstein Come
Back to the Ether?

Galina Granek
Department of Philosophy, Haifa University
Mount Carmel, Haifa 31905, Israel
(e-mail: granek@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx).

http://redshift.vif.com/JournalFiles/V08NO3PDF/V08N3GRF.PDF

According to conventional wisdom, Poincaré failed to derive a
relativity theory mainly as a result of his stubborn adherence to the
ether. In (1905) Einstein constructed a relativity theory that was
based on the assertion that the ether was superfluous. In 1908
Minkowski formulated the theory of the "absolute world". The
nineteenth century ether no longer existed. A new kind of ether (space-
time) came into being. One could keep on maintaining the ether, and at
the same time strip it of the notion of absolute rest. Einstein seemed
to agree, and after 1916 he returned to the ether. In 1920 he combined
Minkowski's absolute world concept and Mach's ideas on rotational
movements: in order to cancel action-at-a-distance, the inertial
interactions between matter and fixed stars should be mediated by a
medium. Einstein called Mach's medium "Mach's ether". In this paper I
demonstrate that Einstein's 1920 reasoning hardly differed from the
one Poincaré had presented prior to 1905. Thus, while Einstein was a
hero because he did away with the ether, this situation lasted a few
years only. This is not to underestimate the magnitude of Einstein's
achievement, but to emphasize the limits of simplistic comparisons
between Einstein and Poincaré.


Introduction

Mach himself had already noticed the problem regarding instantaneous
action-at-a-distance (Mach, 1893, pp. 295-296; English translation):

Nobody would believe that the chance disturbance-say
by an impact-of one body in a system of uninfluenced
bodies which are left to themselves and move uniformly in
a straight line, where all the bodies combine to fix the
system of coordinates, will immediately cause a
disturbance of the others as a consequence.

And the relative motion (1893, p. 282): "[...] is determined
by a medium in which K exists. In such a case we should
have to substitute this medium for Newton's absolute space".
Therefore (Mach, pp. 282-283):

We should [...] have to picture to ourselves some other
medium, filling, say, all space, with respect to the
constitution of which and its kinetic relations to the
bodies placed in it we have at present no adequate
knowledge. In itself such a state of things would not
belong to the impossibilities. [...] we might still hope to
learn more in the future concerning this hypothetical
medium; and from the point of view of science it would be
in every respect a more valuable acquisition than the
forlorn idea of absolute space.

Einstein solved Mach's problem by using Poincaré's ideas and
Minkowski's ideas

He corrected Poincaré's reasoning and he called Mach's "hypothetical
medium" the ether (as Poincaré did), but Einstein's ether was not at
absolute rest. Einstein then identified this new ether with space-time
in accordance with Minkowski's "absolute world" concept:

Minkowski formulated the theory of the "absolute world" in his
lecture, "Space and Time" (1908, p. 107): the laws of nature are
invariant under the Lorentz group. The words "Relativity Postulate"
mean the requirement of invariance under the Lorentz group. The
postulate means that only the four-dimensional world (i.e., spacetime)
in space and time is given by phenomena. Projection in space and in
time may still be undertaken with a certain degree of freedom.

Therefore, Minkowski called the postulate of relativity, "the
postulate of the absolute world" (Postulat der absoluten Welt ). The
Lorentzian nineteenth century ether, corresponding to the idea of
absolute rest, no longer existed; however a new kind of ether (i.e.
the space-time substratum) did exist. Minkowski's ether, the four-
dimensional spacetime, lacked the idea of motion. It did not include
the idea of absolute rest. One could maintain the ether, and yet at
the same time strip it of the notion of absolute motion. One could
call it ether if one wished to use this name.

Einstein was inspired by the above ideas, and suggested the curved
space-time of the general theory of relativity as that medium, calling
it the ether. The Machian point of view concerning the problem of
rotation in physics demanded a medium that would convey the Machian-
Einsteinian inertial and gravitational effects. This medium was termed
"Mach's ether" by Einstein (see quotation below). Therefore, the
problem of rotation demanded a solution in the form of the ether. This
conclusion had already been reached by Poincaré in 1900. In 1920
Einstein repeated Poincaré's claims of (1900), which had been
reprinted in his popular book (1902), which Einstein, as it will be
recalled (see my paper "Poincaré's ether part A"), had read before
1905. I shall examine this state of affairs.

Einstein returns to the ether

After 1916, Einstein returned to a revised form of the ether concept
as a result of the general theory of relativity. In a letter to
Lorentz dated 17 June 1916, Einstein wrote (quoted in Miller, 1986, p.
55; see also Kostro, 1988, p. 238):

I agree with you that the general relativity theory admits
of an ether hypothesis as does the special relativity
theory. But this new ether theory would not violate the
principle of relativity. The reason is that the state
[...metric tensor] = Aether is not that of a rigid body in an
independent state of motion, but a state of motion which is
a function of position determined through the metrical
phenomena.

In 1920 at a lecture in Leiden, Einstein explained why a revised
notion of the ether was required in physics. He repeated Poincaré's
claims of 1900, presented at the Paris physics congress, and which
were reproduced in Science and Hypothesis (1902), according to which
ether is required in order that movements do not take place with
respect to empty space (see my paper, "Poincaré's ether part B" for
Poincaré's reasoning; Einstein, 1920, p. 11):

[...] there is a weighty argument to be adduced in favour
of the ether hypothesis. To deny the ether is ultimately to
assume that empty space has no physical qualities
whatever. The fundamental facts of mechanics do not
harmonize with this view. For the mechanical behaviour
of a corporeal system [Newton's bucket experiment]
hovering freely in empty space depends not only on
relative positions (distances) and relative velocities, but
also on its state of rotation, which physically may be
taken as a characteristic not appertaining to the system in
itself. In order to be able to look upon the rotation of the
system, at least formally, as something real, Newton
objectivizes space. Since he classes his absolute space
together with real things, for him rotation relative to an
absolute space is also something real. Newton might no
less well have called his absolute space "Ether"*; what is
essential is merely that besides observable objects,
another thing, which is not perceptible, must be looked at.

* Newton already thought there was a need for an ether to negate
action at a distance interactions. In 1693, in a letter to Bentley,
Newton wrote (quoted in Jourdian, 1915, p. 252):

That gravity should be innate, inherent, and essential to matter, so
that one body may act upon another at a distance through a vacuum,
without the mediation of anything else, and by and through which
their action and force may be conveyed from one to another, is to me
so great an absurdity that I believe no man who has in philosophical
matters a competent faculty of thinking can ever fall into it. Gravity
must be caused by an agent acting constantly according to certain
laws, but whether this agent be material or immaterial I have left to
the consideration of my readers.

In the Scholium, at the end of the eleventh section of the first book
of the Principia, Newton explained that this agent might be the ether
(Jourdian, 1915, p. 238):

I here use the word attraction for any endeavor whatever made by
bodies to approach each other; whether that endeavor arise from the
action of the bodies themselves as tending mutually to, or agitating
each other by spirits emitted; or whether it arises from the action of
the ether or of the air or of any medium whatever [...]
upon as real, to enable acceleration or rotation to be
looked upon as something real.

Poincaré postulated ether as possessing the following mechanical
quality: the ether is at absolute rest. Already in 1905 Einstein
eliminated the notion of absolute rest. In 1920 he saw the need for an
ether so that there would be no rotation with respect to absolute
space. However, Einstein held that this ether, without its Lorentzian
properties, did not contradict the theory of relativity (1920, p. 7):

[...] the whole change in the conception of the ether,
which the special theory of relativity has brought about,
has consisted in taking away from the ether its last
mechanical quality, namely, its immobility.

Einstein corrected the following misconception held by 19th century
scientists, asserting that absolute space was beyond the scope of
physics. In contrast, absolute rest was an acceptable physical notion.
Einstein also objected to the conception of action-at-a-distance, like
the one mediated through empty space by the fixed stars to the bucket.
He therefore added the revised form of Poincaré's (1900) ether (which
he named "Mach's ether"), which served as Mach's 1893 medium for the
effects of the inertia of the fixed stars (see part C; 1920, pp.
11-12).

It is true Mach tried to avoid having to accept as real
something which is not observable by endeavouring to
substitute in mechanics a mean acceleration with
reference to the totality of masses in the universe in place
of an acceleration with reference to absolute space. But
inertial resistance opposed to relative acceleration of
distant masses presupposes action at a distance; and as
the modern physicist does not believe that he may accept
this action at a distance, he comes back once more, if he
follows Mach, to the ether, which has to serve as a
medium for the effects of inertia. But this conception of
the ether to which we are led by Mach's way of thinking
differs essentially from the ether conceived by Newton, by
Fresnel, and by Lorentz. Mach's ether not only conditions
the behaviour of inert masses, but is also conditioned in
its state by them.

The above quality of Mach's ether stems from the general relativistic
qualities (1920, p. 12):

The metrical qualities of the continuum of space-time
differ in the environment of different points of space-time,
and are partly conditioned by the matter existing outside
of the territory under consideration.

This situation excludes action-at-a-distance, and brings back the
ether in its new form ("Mach's ether") as the general relativistic
space-time. Einstein concluded (Einstein, 1920, p. 15):

Recapitulating: we may say that according to the general
theory of relativity space is endowed with physical
qualities; in this sense, therefore, there exists ether.
According to the general theory of relativity space
without ether is unthinkable; for in such space there not
only would be no propagation of light, but also no
possibility of existence for standards of measuring rods
and clocks, nor therefore any space-time intervals in the
physical sense. But this ether may not be thought of as
endowed with the quality characteristic of ponderable
media, as consisting of parts which may be tracked
through time. The idea of motion may not be applied to it.

Kostro wrote (1988, p. 239) that "on the basis of the principle of
equivalence of energy and mass Einstein arrived at the conclusion that
there is no qualitative difference between the real physical space and
ponderable matter composed of particles. Real physical space, as an
active field possessing energy (and therefore also mass) constitutes
an active matter [...] an ether". Kostro then quoted Einstein who said
in 1930 (Kostro, 1988, p.239):

[...] that now it appears that space will have to be
regarded as a primary thing and that matter is derived
from it, so to speak, as a secondary result. Space is now
having its revenge, so to speak, and is eating up matter.
Although Poincaré did not arrive at the equivalence of energy and
mass (see Granek, 2000), in 1909 he had suggested a conception quite
similar to Einstein's above reasoning. Poincaré suggested the
following conception of matter, which was based on the
electromagnetic world-picture views: inertia of matter (electrons) was
the inertia of the ether, caused by self-induction. The ether's
inertia
(apparent mass of the electron) increased with velocity and became
infinite when the velocity tended towards that of light. The real mass
of the electron stayed constant but it was negligible in relation to
the
apparent mass and could be considered as null. Therefore, if the
apparent mass was the mass that constituted matter, we could almost
claim there was no matter anymore (1909, p. 11):

In this new concept, the constant mass of matter disappeared. The
ether alone, and not matter anymore, was inertial. Only the ether
opposed to a resistance to motion, thus one could say: there was no
matter, there were only holes in the ether.

The reasoning that Einstein gave for his adherence to a new kind of
ether seemed to indicate that Poincaré inspired Einstein when he
revived the notion of the ether. Since Einstein used the name "ether,"
and supplied the same reasons that Poincaré had provided in his
writings as to why one should adhere to the ether, Einstein thus
returned to the 19th century concept of the ether, but stripped of it
its most important characteristic: a medium in a state of absolute
rest. Einstein thus came extremely close to Poincaré's ideas after
1915.

Acknowledgements

This paper is based on my dissertation that was carried out under the
supervision of Prof. Mara Beller. I would like to thank Prof. Beller
for many fruitful historical discussions and for invaluable help. I
would also like to thank Prof. Michele Barone for letting me know
about Ludwik Kostro's works.


References

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Apeiron, Vol. 8, No. 3, July 2001 28
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