Aether theories

Last updated January 24, 2025

In the history of physics, aether theories (or ether theories) proposed the existence of a medium, a space-filling substance or field as a transmission medium for the propagation of electromagnetic or gravitational forces. Since the development of special relativity, theories using a substantial aether fell out of use in modern physics, and are now replaced by more abstract models.

Historical models

Luminiferous aether

Isaac Newton suggests the existence of an aether in the Third Book of Opticks (1st ed. 1704; 2nd ed. 1718): "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?"^[1]

In the 19th century, luminiferous aether (or ether), meaning light-bearing aether, was a theorized medium for the propagation of light. James Clerk Maxwell developed a model to explain electric and magnetic phenomena using the aether, a model that led to what are now called Maxwell's equations and the understanding that light is an electromagnetic wave.^[2] Later, a series of increasingly careful experiments were carried out in the late 1800s, including the Michelson–Morley experiment, to try to detect the motion of Earth through the aether, but no drag was detected. A range of proposed aether-dragging theories could explain the null result but these were more complex, and tended to use arbitrary-looking coefficients and physical assumptions. Joseph Larmor discussed the aether in terms of a moving magnetic field caused by the acceleration of electrons.

Hendrik Lorentz and George Francis FitzGerald offered, within the framework of Lorentz ether theory, an explanation of how the Michelson–Morley experiment could have failed to detect motion through the aether. However, the initial Lorentz theory predicted that motion through the aether would create a birefringence effect, which Rayleigh and Brace tested and failed to find (Experiments of Rayleigh and Brace). All of those results required the full application of the Lorentz transformation by Lorentz and Joseph Larmor in 1904.^[3]^[4]^[5]^[6] Summarizing the results of Michelson, Rayleigh and others, Hermann Weyl would later write that the aether had "betaken itself to the land of the shades in a final effort to elude the inquisitive search of the physicist".^[7] In addition to possessing more conceptual clarity, Albert Einstein's 1905 special theory of relativity could explain all of the experimental results without referring to an aether at all. This eventually led most physicists to conclude that the earlier notion of a luminiferous aether was not a useful concept.

Mechanical gravitational aether

From the 16th until the late 19th century, gravitational effects had also been modeled using an aether. In a note at the end of his work "A Dynamical Theory of the Electromagnetic Field", Maxwell discussed a model for gravity based on a medium similar to the one he used for the electromagnetic field. He concluded that the medium would have "an enormous intrinsic energy" and would necessarily have to be diminished in areas of mass. He could not "understand in what way a medium can possess such properties" so he did not pursue it further.^[8] The most well-known formulation is Le Sage's theory of gravitation, although variations on the idea were entertained by Isaac Newton, Bernhard Riemann, and Lord Kelvin. For example, Kelvin published a note on Le Sage's model in 1873, in which he found Le Sage's proposal thermodynamically flawed and suggested a possible way to salvage it using the then popular vortex theory of the atom. Kelvin later concluded

This kinetic theory of matter is a dream, and can be nothing else, until it can explain chemical affinity, electricity, magnetism, gravitation, and the inertia of masses (that is, crowds) of vortices. Le Sage's theory might give an explanation of gravity and of its relation to inertia of masses, on the vortex theory, were it not for the essential aeolotropy of crystals, and the seemingly perfect isotropy of gravity. No finger post pointing towards a way that can possibly lead to a surmounting of this difficulty, or a turning of its flank, has been discovered, or imagined as discoverable.^[9]

None of those concepts are considered to be viable by the scientific community today.

Non-standard interpretations in modern physics

General relativity

Albert Einstein sometimes used the word aether for the gravitational field within general relativity, but the only similarity of this relativistic aether concept with the classical aether models lies in the presence of physical properties in space, which can be identified through geodesics. As historians such as John Stachel argue, Einstein's views on the "new aether" are not in conflict with his abandonment of the aether in 1905. As Einstein himself pointed out, no "substance" and no state of motion can be attributed to that new aether.^[10] Einstein's use of the word "aether" found little support in the scientific community, and played no role in the continuing development of modern physics.^[11]^[12]

Quantum vacuum

Quantum mechanics can be used to describe spacetime as being non-empty at extremely small scales, fluctuating and generating particle pairs that appear and disappear incredibly quickly. It has been suggested by some such as Paul Dirac ^[13] that this quantum vacuum may be the equivalent in modern physics of a particulate aether. However, Dirac's aether hypothesis was motivated by his dissatisfaction with quantum electrodynamics, and it never gained support from the mainstream scientific community.^[14]

Physicist Robert B. Laughlin commented that the quantum vacuum could be called a "relativistic ether".^[15] Paul Davies writes that while the quantum vacuum resembles in some ways the old concept of the aether, the two differ in a key respect: the quantum vacuum "has no privileged reference frame, no state of rest relative to which a material body could be said to move."^[16]

Pilot waves

Louis de Broglie stated, "Any particle, ever isolated, has to be imagined as in continuous "energetic contact" with a hidden medium."^[17]^[18] However, as de Broglie pointed out, this medium "could not serve as a universal reference medium, as this would be contrary to relativity theory."^[17]

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This timeline describes the major developments, both experimental and theoretical, of:

References

↑ Isaac Newton, The Third Book of Opticks (2nd ed. 1718).
↑ James Clerk Maxwell: "A Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism/Part IV/Chapter XX"
↑ Strutt, John William (Lord Rayleigh) (December 1902). "LXXIII. Does motion through the Æther cause double refraction?". The London, Edinburgh, and Dublin Philosophical Magazine and Journal of Science. 4 (24): 678–683. doi:10.1080/14786440209462891. ISSN 1941-5982.
↑ Newburgh, R. G. (1973-01-01). "Motional Effects in Retardation Plates and Mode Locking in Ring Lasers". Applied Optics. 12 (1): 116–119. Bibcode:1973ApOpt..12..116N. doi:10.1364/AO.12.000116. ISSN 2155-3165. PMID 20125240.
↑ Schaffner, Kenneth F. (1974-03-01). "Einstein Versus Lorentz: Research Programmes and the Logic of Comparative Theory Evaluation". The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science. 25 (1): 45–78. doi:10.1093/bjps/25.1.45. ISSN 0007-0882.
↑ Wetzel, Reinhard A. (1913). "The New Relativity in Physics". Science. 38 (979): 466–474. Bibcode:1913Sci....38..466W. doi:10.1126/science.38.979.466. ISSN 0036-8075. JSTOR 1640709. PMID 17808012.
↑ Weyl, Hermann (1922). Space, Time, Matter. Dutton.
↑ Maxwell, James Clerk (1864). "A Dynamical Theory of the Electromagnetic Field".
↑ Kelvin, Popular Lectures, vol. I. p. 145.
↑ "Einstein: Ether and Relativity". Maths History. Retrieved 2023-12-19.
↑ Kostro, L. (1992), "An outline of the history of Einstein's relativistic ether concept", in Jean Eisenstaedt; Anne J. Kox (eds.), Studies in the history of general relativity, vol. 3, Boston-Basel-Berlin: Birkhäuser, pp. 260–280, ISBN 978-0-8176-3479-7
↑ Stachel, J. (2001), "Why Einstein reinvented the ether", Physics World, 14 (6): 55–56, doi:10.1088/2058-7058/14/6/33
↑ Dirac, Paul: "Is there an Aether?", Nature 168 (1951), p. 906.
↑ Kragh, Helge (2005). Dirac. A Scientific Biography. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. pp. 200–203. ISBN 978-0-521-01756-5.
↑ Laughlin, Robert B. (2005). A Different Universe: Reinventing Physics from the Bottom Down . NY, NY: Basic Books. pp. 120–121. ISBN 978-0-465-03828-2.
↑ Davies, Paul (1996-08-29). "Shaking light from the void". Nature. 382: 761–762. doi:10.1038/382761a0.
1 2 Annales de la Fondation Louis de Broglie, Volume 12, no.4, 1987
↑ Petroni, Nicola Cufaro; Vigier, Jean Pierre (1983). "Dirac's aether in relativistic quantum mechanics". Foundations of Physics. 13 (2): 253. Bibcode:1983FoPh...13..253P. doi:10.1007/BF01889484. S2CID 14888007. It is shown that one can deduce the de Broglie waves as real collective Markov processes on the top of Dirac's aether