Or, How To Blow Aether Wind Up The Ass Of Academia.
The Michelson Morley experiment is considered the definitive proof that there is no aether.
Or, to quote Forbes,
“The aether was famously disproved by the Michelson–Morley experiment.”
So, let’s set the stage:
It’s 1881.
Our use of electricity was still in its infancy, no Tesla yet.
Thomas Young’s wave theory of light was still… Young,
Faraday had outlined magnetic induction for all of us,
Maxwell has given us some equations.
There was no relativity, and no quantums.
People still thought diseases were caused by miasma, “bad air.”
(mal-aria is a remaining example of this type of thought.)
They died from food poisoning after consuming raw and aged meats,
And blamed it on ghosts.
Fairies and goblins of all sorts were taken as serious phenomena by people across Europe.
The idea of evolution was being hotly contested by religious fanatics the world over,
And still is, over a century later,
But biologists at the time were in agreement that life had probably originated elsewhere than Earth.
It was a standard assumption in the sciences that the spaces between planets and stars were filled with a luminiferous aether - some sort of media through which light and other waves must travel - for at least a hundred years. Since Newton’s time.
It was so widely accepted that when Michelson and Morley set out to prove the aether had wind, everybody took them completely seriously. And they were all shocked to find out that their assumptions had been incorrect; that the aether was not blowing in a particular direction.
Their experiment proves only that the aether is not moving in a direction,
Not that there is no medium present.
But there was no way for convention to reconcile the idea of a stationary medium, because the aether, having by that point become a standard, had other principles built into it and built upon it.
Because all our models were based off the behavior of measurable media, like air and water, we assumed that aether must behave in a similar fashion… And that if you were travelling through it, in any direction, resistance should be lower at angles perpendicular to your vector of motion.
Logically, that’s a reasonable assumption.
However, it is not reasonable to conclude proof of a negative.
You can’t prove a negative, and it’s sort of unscientific to try and concretely prove anything,
Since that would constitute a dilemma of unfalsifiability.
There are at least three ways of looking at the results:
The aether does not exist.
or
The aether does not move how we expected it to.
or
The aether does not move at all.
Here the list of things we knew for sure about the aether leading up to the experiment:
"Doth not this aethereal medium in passing out of water, glass, crystal, and other compact and dense bodies in empty spaces, grow denser and denser by degrees, and by that means refract the rays of light not in a point, but by bending them gradually in curve lines? ...Is not this medium much rarer within the dense bodies of the Sun, stars, planets and comets, than in the empty celestial space between them? And in passing from them to great distances, doth it not grow denser and denser perpetually, and thereby cause the gravity of those great bodies towards one another, and of their parts towards the bodies; every body endeavouring to go from the denser parts of the medium towards the rarer?" - Newton, 1718
Even Newton didn’t make any specific claims to the nature of the emptiness.
Then this other smart guy said the thing he was lookin’ at behaved the same way as that other thing that probably is, probably did:
"In several parts of this treatise an attempt has been made to explain electromagnetic phenomena by means of mechanical action transmitted from one body to another by means of a medium occupying the space between them. The undulatory theory of light also assumes the existence of a medium. We have now to show that the properties of the electromagnetic medium are identical with those of the luminiferous medium." - Maxwell, 1873
At the turn of the twentieth century, we had no device sophisticated enough to poke and prod at the aether and return any kind of results, and to date at the time of this writing we have no device that can prove the existence of “aether.”
But we do kinda require it for all of the quantum physics to work at all.
“Zero-point energy (ZPE) or ground state energy is the lowest possible energy that a quantum mechanical system may have. Unlike in classical mechanics, quantum systems constantly fluctuate in their lowest energy state due to the Heisenberg uncertainty principle. As well as atoms and molecules, the empty space of the vacuum has these properties. According to Quantum Field Theory the universe can be thought of not as isolated particles but continuous fluctuating fields: matter fields, whose quanta are fermions (i.e. leptons and quarks), and force fields, whose quanta are bosons (e.g. photons and gluons). All these fields have zero-point energy. These fluctuating zero-point fields lead to a kind of reintroduction of an aether in physics, since some systems can detect the existence of this energy. However this aether cannot be thought of as a physical medium if it is to be Lorentz invariant such that there is no contradiction with Einstein's theory of special relativity.” wiki
The shit piles up so fast it’s tough to keep your head above it.
Everybody will wander off to do something interesting if I try and explain a Lorentz invariant.
Let’s simplify, this leaves us with two choices:
Aether exists, and yet is a non physical medium.
Einstein was wrong about special relativity.
Special relativity states that:
“The laws of physics are invariant (i.e. identical) in all inertial systems (non-accelerating frames of reference).
The speed of light in a vacuum is the same for all observers, regardless of the motion of the light source.”
This was a while back, and some new information has come to “light” since then.
To point one, it is generally accepted that the expansion of the universe is accelerating,
https://www.nature.com/articles/srep35596
Which would include our star and planet, thereby nullifying inertial systems.
All systems we’ve studied are accelerating frames of reference.
Point two: there is no evidence of true vacuum, and a great deal of evidence to the contrary, in the form of numerous types of radiation and energy measurable even in the emptiest spaces we can create in a laboratory. Usually physics refers to vacuum as the “ground state” or lowest energy possible in a system, which for reference, still has a potential voltage of exactly infinity.
So, instead of a medium through which radiation passes, we decided it would be better to have a frictionless empty space that gets bent by gravity. And how does the fabric made of nothingness get bent, specifically? By massless charged particles called gravitons.
Nobody has found a graviton yet, but they’re pretty sure they’re going to find one.
Any day now.
So, what I do is, I set up an experiment that measures graviton wind.
We got two little weights, and they’re set up perpendicular to each other,
And because the Earth is going in a direction, the gravity wind is sure to be stronger one way,
Then I’m gonna turn on my sensors and see which weight gets heavier.
And they stay exactly the same, so I conclude,
There are no gravitons.
Of course you would say that I’m leaping to conclusions, that I cannot invalidate the time spent and hard work of so many other physicists who came before me, and their countless hours of study and calculations of gravitons, with just one experimental apparatus that could be built based on faulty assumptions about gravitons or how to measure them!
Sure I can. Michelson and Morley did. Why not?
I’ve got another experiment here where I’ve got a light bulb and some photovoltaic cells.
Every time a photon hits a cell it’s going to read out on a display,
So I can estimate how many photons are hitting the cell.
Then I move the cells farther and farther away from the light,
And rotate them until I find the space between the photons from the light,
Where even though they’re directly exposed to the bulb, they detect nothing.
But no matter where I put them, they always detect some light.
There seem to be no gaps in between the photons, so I conclude,
There are no photons.
I attach a wire to a battery,
And run current made of electrons through the wire,
To see how long it takes before enough electrons have passed through it,
That all the copper turns to dust and pours out of one end of the wire.
But it goes for a really long time, and the copper is intact, so I conclude,
There are no electrons.
In point of fact, I don’t need to set up any experiments to disprove electrons or photons or gravitons, neither did Michelson and Morley need an experiment to disprove aether.
That which can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.
In 1881 there was no evidence of aether. At all. Zero. Zip. Nada.
In 2017, there is an overwhelming amount of evidence of it.
And yet there is no evidence of
Electrons,
Photons,
Gravitons,
Quarks,
Neutrinos,
Leptons,
Bosons,
Etc, etc, etc.
This isn’t about whether there is or there isn’t aether.
The issue is that we’ve hung all our physics from a couple of assumptions,
Assumptions that are now treated as facts supported by evidence,
Assumptions that are regarded as infallible, and those with contrary views are regarded as heretics, the punishment for refusal to accept the doctrine is academic exile.
The penalty for contradicting it is mockery and ridicule.
Physics is no longer a science.
It is a religion.
Devoutly faithful adherents to ideas made up by people who are long dead, loudly defending them in the name of convention, and tossing out any idea that they disagree with or that disagrees with them. That sounds a lot like the church, doesn’t it?
