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Aether

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The aether (also spelled ether) is the name given to a material medium supposed to fill all of space and to serve as the physical carrier of light, of electric and magnetic fields, and in many versions of gravitation and of matter itself. The spelling "aether" is generally preferred on this wiki to distinguish the physical medium from the organic compound of the same name.

For most of the nineteenth century the existence of such a medium was not a fringe position but the central working assumption of physics. Light was known to be a wave, waves were known to be disturbances in something, and the great task of Victorian physics was to determine what that something was made of. James Clerk Maxwell built his electromagnetic theory on a mechanical model of it. After 1905 the mainstream abandoned the medium: Einstein's special relativity showed that the equations could be written without it, and the aether passed out of the physics curriculum, surviving in the textbooks mainly as a cautionary tale about superfluous hypotheses.

It did not pass out of physics altogether. The aether is the single most persistent organising idea in the literature collected on this wiki: Category:Aether holds well over five hundred pages, and the paper archive contains some 373 items on the subject, spanning from the 1970s to the present. The researchers documented here return to it because they regard a field without a medium as an unfinished explanation — a description of what happens rather than an account of how it happens.

What this article cannot do is present "the aether theory," because there is no such thing. The most important fact about the aether literature on this wiki is that it contains many different aethers, and they are not compatible with one another. Some are fluids, some are solids, some are clouds of particles, some are not substances at all but simply preferred reference frames. Some are dragged along by the Earth and some are not — and on that question in particular the researchers here argue against each other as vigorously as any of them argues against relativity. The purpose of the sections below is to set out those families honestly, on their own terms, and to be clear about where they conflict.

Historical background

Maxwell's vortex sea

The modern aether descends from Descartes' vortices and from the wave optics of Young and Fresnel, but its decisive formulation is Maxwell's. In "On Physical Lines of Force" (1861–62) James Clerk Maxwell constructed a working mechanical model of space as a sea of rotating molecular vortices separated by small particles acting as idle wheels, and showed that transverse waves in such a medium would travel at a speed calculable from purely electrical measurements — a speed that turned out to be the speed of light. This was one of the great unifications in the history of science, and it was achieved by taking a mechanical medium seriously.

Nikola Tesla set the same idea in a far older frame. In "Man's Greatest Achievement," written in 1907 and published in the Milwaukee Sentinel in 1930, he wrote:

Long ago he (mankind) recognized that all perceptible matter comes from a primary substance, of a tenuity beyond conception and filling all space — the Ākāśa or luminiferous ether — which is acted upon by the life-giving Prana or creative force, calling into existence, in never ending cycles, all things and phenomena. The primary substance, thrown into infinitesimal whirls of prodigious velocity, becomes gross matter; the force subsiding, the motion ceases and matter disappears, reverting to the primary substance.

That the vortex-fluid picture was still standard reference material well into the twentieth century can be seen from the article "Ether (in Physics)" in the 1937 Encyclopaedia Britannica, which said of the medium, in connection with the speed of light:

The most probable surmise or guess at present is that the ether is a perfectly incompressible continuous fluid, in a state of fine-grained vortex motion, circulating with that same enormous speed. For it has been partly, though as yet incompletely, shown that such a vortex fluid would transmit waves of the same general nature as light waves — i.e., periodic disturbances across the line of propagation — and would transmit them at a rate of the same order of magnitude as the vortex or circulation speed.

The idea lapsed as a mainstream research programme after the Second World War.

The drag problem and the classical experiments

The nineteenth-century difficulty was never whether a medium existed but how it moved. Fresnel proposed in 1818 that a transparent body moving through a stationary aether partially drags the light within it, by a coefficient depending on refractive index; Fizeau's 1851 flowing-water experiment measured a drag of very nearly that amount. Stokes proposed in 1845 the opposite extreme — that the aether is completely carried along by the Earth — which explained the absence of a terrestrial aether wind at the price of difficulties with stellar aberration, the small annual displacement of star positions that Bradley had discovered in 1728 and that a fully entrained medium seemed unable to produce.

Michelson and Morley's 1887 interferometer experiment was designed to detect the Earth's motion through a stationary aether as a second-order fringe shift, and reported a displacement far smaller than expected. Lorentz and FitzGerald preserved the stationary aether by supposing that moving bodies contract along the line of motion, an assumption that grew into the Lorentz transformations. Sagnac's 1913 rotating interferometer, by contrast, gave a large first-order effect, which Sagnac himself read as a direct demonstration of a stationary aether; see Sagnac Effect. Miller, working at Mount Wilson through the 1920s, reported a small but systematic and seasonally varying fringe shift — a residual aether drift of a few kilometres per second — which he defended until his death and which Shankland and colleagues attributed in 1955 to thermal effects.

Why the aether was abandoned – and why dissidents reject that verdict

The mainstream account is straightforward. The aether was introduced to be the medium of light; every experiment designed to detect motion relative to it failed; special relativity reproduced all the successful predictions of Lorentz's theory without needing the medium at all; and a substance with no detectable consequences is not a physical hypothesis. On this reading the aether was not disproved so much as made unemployed.

The researchers on this wiki dispute nearly every step of that argument, though not in a single voice.

The most common objection is that a wave without a medium is not an explanation. This is the theme of Dimiter G Stoinov's series "Why Physics Needs the Ether" (2005–2009) and of Ionel Dinu's "The Aether of Space" (2008), and it is stated most bluntly in the literature on Maxwell: the equations that physics still uses were derived from a medium, and it is not obvious that they survive the deletion of the thing that generated them. David Tombe has made this his central historical claim, arguing in "The Significance of Maxwell's Equations" (2012) and "Maxwell's Original Equations" (2011) that what twentieth-century textbooks present as Maxwell's theory is a reduced set stripped of the physical model that gave the original its content.

A second objection is that the Michelson-Morley result has been over-read. Several researchers here argue that the experiment's null was neither as null nor as decisive as the textbook account has it. Neil E Munch identified what he considered three flawed assumptions in the analysis in "Flawed Assumptions in MMX Prevented Aether Detection" (2006); Robert J Bennett argued in "Nullification of the MMX Null Result" (2013) and "MMX Null: Voided by the Vacuum" (2013) that the apparatus as built could not have detected what it was looking for; and Raymond H Gallucci reviewed the standard reading critically in "Michelson-Morley Interferometer Experiment of 1887: 'Null' Result" (2015). Others, notably on the local-aether models discussed below, argue that a terrestrial interferometer should return a null result and that the experiment therefore never tested what it was thought to test.

A third objection is historical: that the aether was never actually abandoned by Einstein himself. Ludwig Kostro has documented at length — in "Albert Einstein and the Theory of the Ether" (1989), "The Physical Meaning of Albert Einstein's Relativistic Ether Concept" (1994) and "Einstein's New Ether 1916-1955" (2008) — that having denied the ether in 1905 Einstein reintroduced a "new ether" from 1916 onward in connection with general relativity, in which the metric field itself plays the role of the medium, and continued to defend that position for the rest of his life. Galina Granek pursued the same question for Poincaré. On this reading the received story that "physics abandoned the ether in 1905" is not history but pedagogy.

A fourth objection is that positive results exist and have been set aside. That claim is examined in the section on the experimental record below.

Not everyone on this wiki accepts any of this. The aether has determined critics here as well, and they are discussed in the "Criticism of the aether from researchers on this wiki" section.

Families of aether model on this wiki

The models below are grouped by what they say the aether is. The groupings are drawn from the papers themselves. They overlap at the edges, and several researchers appear in more than one, but the distinctions are real: a medium that is a compressible gas and a medium that is a crystalline solid are not two descriptions of the same thing, and they make different predictions about the character of light.

Fluid, gas and vortex aethers

This is the largest family and the closest in spirit to Maxwell and to the 1937 Britannica passage above. The aether is a fluid — usually a gas, sometimes an ideal incompressible liquid — and the phenomena of physics are its flows, pressures, vortices and density gradients.

Steven Rado developed the most systematic version in his books Aethro-Kinematics (1994) and Aethro-Dynamics (2009) and in papers such as "Theory of Evolution of Matter in Aethro-dynamics" (2000), treating the aether as an ideal gas obeying ordinary kinetic theory and deriving the known forces of nature from its kinematics. Adolphe Martin's "The Ether Revisied" (1994) and "Gravitation in a Gaseous Ether" (2005) build a gas of "cosmons" and obtain Newtonian gravitation from the Clausius correction to the ideal-gas equation. Charles Kenneth Thornhill worked with a gas-like ether in which the transverse electric and magnetic oscillations are joined by a longitudinal oscillation of the medium itself, and extended it to cosmology in "A Non-Singular Ethereal Cosmology" (2001). Stoinov's series argues for a gaseous vacuum in which what are taken for transverse electromagnetic waves are in fact longitudinal, sound-like disturbances — a position that sets him directly against the solid-aether family below, for whom transversality is the whole point.

Ionel Dinu approaches the fluid aether experimentally as well as theoretically. His "Bernoulli Equation for the Aether and Ampere's Effect" (2007), "Optical Phenomena in the Aether" (2008) and "Rudiments of a Theory of Aether" (2010) apply ordinary fluid mechanics to electromagnetic problems, and he has argued that fluid mechanics is the neglected discipline on which a physical understanding of the world depends. Robert A Kerr made the case for a universal aethereal fluid on the grounds that wave behaviour admits no other mechanical explanation. Hector A Munera worked with a four-dimensional aether of preons in continual motion, and Valery P Dmitriyev with a turbulent ideal fluid in which particles appear as bubbles or voids — his "E=mc2 in the Turbulent Aether" (2006) obtains the mass-energy relation as the work done in creating a cavity against the pressure of the fluid.

Vortex versions proper are represented by Chiharu Sano's spiral and fractal vortex structures, by Vladimir B Ginzburg's spiral field theory, and outside this paper set by Paramahamsa Tewari's Space Vortex Theory, in which matter, mass and charge are all derived from vortex motion in a fluid, non-material space. Karim Amen Khaidarov's "Aethereal Mechanics" (2004) and Jaroslav G Klyushin's work on electron motion in a fluid medium belong to the same tradition.

Solid, elastic and lattice aethers

The opposing mechanical tradition takes seriously the oldest objection to a fluid: ordinary fluids do not transmit transverse waves, and light is transverse. A solid does. This family therefore proposes an elastic solid or a crystal lattice.

Delbert J Larsen derived Maxwell's equations from a postulated two-component solid aether in papers of 1998 and 1999, arguing that the transverse vibrations of a solid already exhibit most of the properties of light and that the nineteenth-century physicists were right to look for one. Menahem Simhony developed the most quantitatively committed version, the epola or electron-positron lattice model, in which space is a real crystalline solid built of alternating bound electrons and positrons, and in which the speed of light, inertia and gravitation are derived from the measured elastic properties of such a lattice by the standard methods of solid-state physics. Harold Aspden proposed a dynamic aether structured as a fluid crystal lattice — a hybrid position — and treated it as the energy source underlying quantum activity and the creation of matter; his "The Contemporary Aether" (1996) is a defence of the whole programme against the charge of obsolescence.

Valery P Dmitriyev also worked the solid side, arguing in "The Substratum Origin of Relativistic Effects" (1993) that the Lorentz contraction and its companions are the phenomenology of a solid substratum with particles of matter modelled as point defects — and noting the awkward corollary that within the linear-elastic range no sign of the substratum, such as entrainment, can appear at all. Duncan W Shaw posits an aether of highly elastic cells in "Electricity and Magnetism: A Return to Aether" (2011). William R Hohenberger has pursued a structural rather than mechanical route, deriving fractal and octahedral architectures for the aether from which he calculates Planck's length and the fine-structure constant.

Particulate and corpuscular aethers

A third family declines both the continuum and the lattice and makes the aether a swarm of discrete sub-particles far smaller than the electron, colliding and rebounding like gas molecules but individually real and individually catalogued.

William R Jones proposed in "Gravitino Ether Hypothesis" (1970) an ether of tiny high-velocity "gravitinos" with a sub-ether of sub-gravitinos beneath it, and in "How the Ether Replaces Relativity" (1987) argued that such a medium supplies literal cause-and-effect mechanisms in place of relativity's constructions. James Marsen, with Richard A. Marsen, sets out the Tron Theory, in which the aether — the "tronos" — is a tenuous array of contiguous trons, particles several orders of magnitude smaller than the electron, themselves composed of rons and those of Ons; where the arrays are highly compressed they cohere into ordinary matter, and quantum indeterminacy is treated as an artefact of an unmodelled medium rather than an irreducible feature of nature. Bernard L Feldman's "Discontinuous Ether Model" (2000) proposes sub-atomic "ethertrons" originating in stellar cores; Leslie V Iverson treats atomic matter as slowed and condensed ether particles; Nainan K Varghese develops an all-encompassing universal medium; and Jean de Climont, best known here for compiling The Worldwide List of Dissident Scientists, has argued in his own work for a Cartesian aether of corpuscles carrying angular momentum, condensed within atomic nuclei, from which he claims to recover both Newtonian gravitation and the transverse character of light.

Electromagnetic-medium aethers

A fourth family identifies the aether not with a neutral mechanical substance but with electricity itself — a dense sea of charge whose flows and rotations are the electromagnetic field.

David Tombe is the most prolific exponent on this wiki. On his model space is a dense "electric sea" of rotating electron-positron dipoles: electrons are sinks and positrons sources of a fluid aether, electric charge is the rate of flow into or out of them, and magnetism is the alignment of the resulting tiny vortices. From this he treats gravity as a rarefied aether inflow producing tension and electricity as a pressurised flow, derives centrifugal force from fine-grained pressure in the polarised sea, and argues in "Aether Causes Anti-Friction in the Planetary Orbits" (2007) that the classic objection — that a material medium would drag the planets to a halt — is exactly backwards. His "The Double Helix Theory of the Magnetic Field" (2006) and "Maxwell's Sea of Molecular Vortices" (2010) set out the model in detail.

Miles F Osmaston's Continuum Theory proposes a "particle-tied" aether whose properties are anchored to matter rather than free-standing, and from which he develops a gravity-electric field applied from the Earth's ionosphere to galaxy dynamics without cold dark matter. Joseph F Cuny built photon structure from Faraday's lines of force; Roland H Dishington modelled the electron as a zone of depletion in the aether bounded by a standing wave, with all energy deriving from distortions of that structure. Duncan W Shaw extended his aether to entanglement in "Maxwell's Aether: A Solution to Entanglement" (2016), arguing that the correlations usually assigned to quantum mechanics are properties of the medium.

Francis Viren Fernandes developed the "186-ether", a quantised aether he presents as the common source of electromagnetism and gravity, in a long series including "Evidence of Ether" (2009), "Radiation of Light by 186-Ether: Unity of Light and Gravity" (2010) and "Unveil 186-Ether @ 144 GeV" (2011), in which radiation is a wave in the medium rather than the locomotion of photons. Wladimir Guglinski's Quantum Ring Theory likewise rests on a revived aether, treated in his papers "Ether" and "The Sound of Ether".

Entrained and local aethers

This family accepts the medium but denies that it is universally at rest. The aether near a body is carried with that body, so no aether wind is detectable at the Earth's surface, and the classical null results are exactly what should be expected.

John-Erik Persson is the wiki's most persistent advocate of entrainment. Across "The Generated Ether" (2005), "Starlight Aberration and the Entrained Ether" (2006), "The Entrained Ether and GPS" (2006), "The Etherless Century" (2009) and "The Falling Ether" (2013) he argues that the two experiments usually held to have established special relativity — Michelson-Morley and stellar aberration — are simply uninformative about an entrained medium, that aberration has been misinterpreted, and that the Sagnac effect and GPS are the experiments that actually settle the question, and settle it in favour of entrainment. Antonis Agathangelidis reached a related conclusion by re-interpreting the Riis-Lee-Hall, Brillet-Hall, Hafele-Keating, Michelson-Morley and Michelson-Gale results in terms of a terrestrial Stokes aether gravitationally bound to the Earth. Giuseppe Antoni and Umberto Bartocci gave a classical dragged-aether reading of Fizeau's experiment; Carl A Zapffe proposed a magnetospheric drag theory; Carel van der Togt argued that the aberration argument against a dragged aether does not hold.

The most fully worked modern version is Ching-Chuan Su's local-ether model. On Su's account there is no single universal medium; instead, wherever a celestial body's gravitational influence dominates, a local ether forms that is at rest with respect to that body's gravitational potential. Such an ether is carried with, but does not rotate with, its body, and the local ethers are nested — the Earth's inside the Sun's, the Sun's inside the galaxy's. A terrestrial interferometer is therefore nearly at rest in its medium, and the residual wind due to the Earth's rotation is a few hundred metres per second rather than 30 km/s, giving a predicted fringe effect thousands of times below the sensitivity of the classic experiments. The Sagnac effect becomes a receiver-motion effect rather than a rotation effect. James Marsen has advocated this model on the wiki, together with the independent 1986 local-ether proposal of Petr Beckmann, and has drawn from it a proposed decisive test: fly a Michelson-Morley interferometer in low Earth orbit or in interplanetary space, where the local-ether model predicts a positive fringe shift corresponding to the craft's orbital velocity and special relativity predicts none. Sankar Hajra argues on related classical grounds that electromagnetic fields, being real physical objects subject to gravitation, are carried along with the Earth near its surface.

This family is in direct conflict with the next one. Ronald R Hatch's "Against Ether Drag" (2009) argues that recent claims reconciling ether drag with stellar aberration are falsified by independent clock data, and Joseph Levy builds his entire theory on an aether not dragged by the motion of celestial bodies, examining the experimental case explicitly in "Is the aether entrained by the motion of celestial bodies, what do the experiments tell us?" (2012). Entrainment is not a detail on which the aether community differs mildly; it is the deepest internal division in this literature.

Lorentzian and preferred-frame aethers

The sixth family is the most austere. It offers no mechanical model of the medium at all — no vortices, no lattice, no particles — and asks only that there exist one privileged frame in which light propagates isotropically, with respect to which moving clocks genuinely run slow and moving rods genuinely contract. On this view Lorentz was right and Einstein merely re-described him, at the cost of making real physical effects into conventions of measurement.

Joseph Levy has developed the most extensive version on this wiki. Assuming a fundamental aether frame and the anisotropy of the one-way speed of light in every other frame, he derives "extended space-time transformations" and argues in "Aether-Theory Clock Retardation vs Special Relativity Time Dilation" (2008) for the crucial distinction his programme rests on: clock retardation is something that happens to clocks, not something that happens to time. Ronald R Hatch, one of the principal algorithm designers of GPS, developed a "Modified Lorentzian Ether Theory" constrained at every step by experiment, and searched for a drift signature against the cosmic background dipole in "In Search of an Ether Drift" (2002). Franco Selleri argued from his inertial transformations for "Recovering the Lorentz Ether" (2004). Alexander L Kholmetskii defined a general class of "covariant ether theories" — alternatives to special relativity that nevertheless satisfy the general relativity principle — and sought phenomena on which they and special relativity give different predictions. Doug Marett argued in "On the Continuing Relevance of Lorentz Ether Theory in the Age of Relativity" (2011) that virtually no optical experiment performed to date can distinguish the two theories at all. Mayeul Arminjon built a scalar ether theory of gravitation with a flat background and a curved physical metric; Robert J Bennett proposed the ALFA model of an absolute lab frame with a flexible aether; Dennis J McCarthy identified a specific preferred frame from muon-decay and electromagnetic data.

Note what this family gives up. It has no answer to the question the fluid and lattice theorists consider fundamental — what the medium is made of — and many of the mechanical theorists regard a preferred frame without a substance as no aether at all.

Space-time, vacuum and quantum aethers

A seventh group identifies the aether with the quantum vacuum, with the zero-point field, or with space-time itself, and typically aims at deriving quantum mechanics from a real underlying medium rather than accepting its indeterminacy as fundamental.

Alan McCone's "Sub-Quantum Physics" series treats the quantum wave function as an envelope of motion produced by bombardment of the particle by the surrounding medium, and derives the oscillator ground state from aether stochastic white noise. Nina B Sotina derives the Schrödinger equation from deterministic classical mechanics on the assumption that the ether exists, treating it as the hidden variable. Carel van der Togt derives Planck's constant from an ether. Friedwardt Winterberg obtained a nonlinear generalisation of the Lorentz transformations from a quantum ether departing from special relativity at very high energies. Athanassios A Nassikas developed a "minimum contradictions" quantum space-time ether in which space-time is stochastic and is itself matter-ether, existing in both gravitational and electromagnetic forms. Michele Barone traced the transformation of the aether into the modern vacuum state across quantum mechanics, quantum electrodynamics and cosmology. David W Thomson and Jim Bourassa's Aether Physics Model quantifies the aether alongside subatomic particles and the force laws. Elizabeth A Rauscher and Richard Amoroso worked an ether model in complex Minkowski space.

Energetic, biological and free-energy aethers

The eighth family treats the aether primarily as an energy source and as something with biological and atmospheric effects, and descends from Wilhelm Reich's orgone research rather than from Maxwell.

James DeMeo, who took his Ph.D. in 1986 on the experimental testing of Reich's claims and directs the Orgone Biophysical Research Lab, has argued for "A Dynamic and Substantive Cosmological Ether" (2004), reported practical biological and atmospheric applications of aether theory (1998), and written on Dayton C Miller's aether-drift results and on independent discoveries of what he calls a dynamic biocosmic energy in space. His anthology Heretic's Notebook (2002) collects work on ether-drift and cosmic life-energy together.

Related but distinct is the free-energy tradition, in which the aether is a reservoir from which usable power might be drawn: Dan A Davidson's "Free Energy, Gravity and the Aether" (1996), Jose Ruiz's proposal for converting aetheric energy to magnetic energy, Charles A Yost on electric field propulsion, and the body of work connecting the medium to Nikola Tesla's later research described at Tesla Technology. Paramahamsa Tewari combined a vortex theory of space with a "Space Power Generator" he and several engineers reported as operating above unity. Claims of this kind are the most contested part of the aether literature and are not accepted by most of the theorists in the other families.

Where the families genuinely conflict

It is worth stating the incompatibilities plainly rather than leaving them implicit.

  • Fluid versus solid. A gas cannot support transverse waves; a solid can. Stoinov concludes that electromagnetic waves must therefore really be longitudinal; Larsen and Simhony conclude that the medium must therefore really be a solid. These are not two ways of saying the same thing.
  • Entrained versus stationary. Persson, Agathangelidis and Su require the medium to be carried with the Earth; Levy and Hatch require that it is not. Both sides appeal to stellar aberration, to Michelson-Morley and to the Sagnac effect, and read them oppositely.
  • Substance versus frame. The Lorentzian family needs only a preferred frame and offers no substance; the mechanical families regard that as an evasion. John E Chappell proposed a middle path in "The Aether: Defined in Terms of Function, Conceptualized from Known Facts" (1997), defining the aether functionally — as whatever it is that fixes light paths in Sagnac-type experiments — on the model of gravity, whose reality we accept without knowing its nature.
  • Whether the Michelson-Morley result is null. Bennett, Munch and Gallucci argue the experiment was misdesigned or misread and that a real signal is there; Su, Marsen and the local-aether theorists argue the null is genuine, expected, and evidence for their model. Both positions are anti-relativistic; they are not the same position.
  • Whether the aether is inert or energetic. The orgone and free-energy traditions attribute active, extractable, even biological properties to the medium. Most of the mechanical and Lorentzian theorists do not, and would not recognise their aether in that description.

Aether drift and the experimental record

The claim that a drift has been measured is central to the case made here, and the wiki's own experimental papers should be read alongside the classical ones.

Dayton C Miller's Mount Wilson interferometry of the 1920s remains the touchstone. Glen W Deen reconstructed Miller's cosmic model and data reduction in "D. C. Miller's 1933 Cosmic Ether Model" (2000), reporting and attempting to refute the 1955 Shankland critique, and in earlier work tried to reconcile Miller's absolute solar motion of about 208 km/s toward the Large Magellanic Cloud with the cosmic microwave background dipole of about 370 km/s toward Leo — some 85 degrees away in direction. James DeMeo has independently defended Miller's result. That the two most cited "drift" values in this literature point in different directions is itself an unresolved problem within it.

Later claimed detections come from several directions and do not agree with each other in magnitude. Wilbur Silvertooth reported in "Motion Through the Ether" (1989) an electronic measurement of laboratory motion of the order of 400 km/s, a result Stefan Marinov attempted to repeat. Yuri M Galaev reported anisotropy and a measurable "kinematic ether viscosity" in millimetre-radiowave (2001) and optical (2002) bands. Eugene I Shtyrkov reported in 2005 an annual orbital drift component of 29.4 km/s from geostationary-satellite tracking — almost exactly the Earth's orbital speed, and two orders of magnitude below Silvertooth's figure. Carlos Enrique Navia reported an amplified Doppler shift in laser diffraction aligned with the COBE dipole direction. Stephan J G Gift argued the empirical case for the medium from one-way propagation data in "Experimental Detection of the Ether" (2006). Norbert Feist proposed a Doppler-radar method requiring only one clock and no synchronisation convention.

Related experimental work includes Patrick Cornille's analysis with Jean-Louis Naudin and Alexandre Szames of why the Trouton-Noble experiment failed and how they believe it could be made to succeed (1999), Herman Holushko's 109-day measurement of light-beam deflection (2004), and Bent Kargaard Nielsen's laser detection experiment (2009). Jean Pierre Vigier gave a relativistic reading, with a non-zero photon mass, of the small drift velocities Michelson, Morley and Miller reported. Hans Deyssenroth has re-analysed the Michelson-Morley experiment and the Lunar Laser Ranging data with a view to separating relativistic effects that are observed from those that are physically realised.

The record also contains careful negative assessments from within this community. Thomas E Phipps reviewed the reportedly successful drift searches in "Getting Wind of the Ether" (1988) and concluded that no compelling evidence then refuted the relativity principle, and warned in "Potier's Principle: A Trap for Unwary Etherists and Others" (1992) against a common formal error in first-order aether arguments.

The aether and relativity

The relation between the aether and relativity in this literature is more complicated than simple opposition, and three distinct positions can be separated.

The first is replacement: relativity is wrong and an aether theory should take its place. This is the position of most of the mechanical families, and of Franco Selleri, Joseph Levy and Robert J Bennett among the frame theorists.

The second is equivalence: Lorentzian aether theory and special relativity are empirically indistinguishable, and the choice between them is philosophical rather than experimental. Doug Marett argues this explicitly, and Alexander L Kholmetskii's programme of identifying phenomena where covariant ether theories and special relativity do differ is an attempt to break precisely that deadlock. S. Richard Hazelett's "Special Relativity: The Experiments Equally Support Various Aether Theories" (1998) makes the same point from the experimental side. If the two are equivalent, then the historical decision to abandon the medium was, as this argument goes, a matter of taste presented as a matter of evidence.

The third is compatibility: the aether belongs inside relativity rather than against it. This is Ludwig Kostro's reading of Einstein's own post-1916 position, and Michael C Duffy's argument in "Ether as a Disclosing Model" (2008) that the modern ether concept is compatible with relativity, quantum mechanics and geometrisation, and that the word is avoided mainly because of its polemical history. Athanassios A Nassikas and Mayeul Arminjon work in this register, as does the historical scholarship of James E Beichler on the space-curvature theory of matter and aether between 1870 and 1920.

Where the aether theorists most nearly agree is on a methodological complaint: that relativity converts physical questions into conventions about measurement, and that a preferred frame — whether or not it is filled with anything — restores the possibility of asking what is actually happening.

Criticism of the aether from researchers on this wiki

This wiki documents dissent, not a doctrine, and the aether has serious critics among its own contributors.

Curtis E Renshaw rejects the medium outright, treating the whole Fizeau-to-Sagnac experimental family in "Fresnel, Fitzeau, Hoek, Michelson-Morley, Michelson-Gale and Sagnac in Aetherless Galilean Space" (1996) and "Light Speed and Aether" (2000) from a Galilean standpoint that requires no aether at all. Robert de Hilster and David de Hilster's Particle Model gives light, gravity, magnetism and electricity a physical basis by means of particles rather than a medium, and the wiki's literature contains an explicit comparison of the two approaches; the argument made there is that the aether is not the only way to give light physicality, and that the dissident slogan "the aether was wrongly abandoned" begs the question against the alternatives. Jeff Alford examined what he regards as the logical inconsistencies of the all-pervading ether hypothesis. Thomas E Phipps, as noted above, was sceptical of the drift claims. Ronald R Hatch rejects entrainment, and Harold Aspden and Theodore D Mitsopoulos both wrote replies to Harold Willis Milnes's "nine objections to the aether," which is itself a reminder that the objections were being pressed from within this community and not only from outside it.

Researchers on this wiki

  • David Tombe — British independent researcher; the wiki's most prolific writer on the aether as a dense electron-positron "electric sea," and on the historical reconstruction of Maxwell's original equations.
  • John-Erik Persson — Swedish researcher; the leading advocate here of an entrained aether, arguing from stellar aberration, the Sagnac effect and GPS.
  • Joseph Levy — French theorist; author of the multi-volume Ether Space-Time and Cosmology material, developing a preferred-frame aether that is explicitly not dragged by celestial bodies.
  • Ionel Dinu — Romanian physicist and experimentalist; fluid-mechanical aether theory backed by his own underwater rotating-cylinder experiments.
  • Ronald R Hatch — American satellite-navigation engineer, designer of the Hatch filter and past President of the Institute of Navigation; Modified Lorentzian Ether Theory, and a firm critic of aether drag.
  • Harold Aspden — British physicist and IBM patent director; a dynamic aether structured as a fluid crystal lattice, developed over four decades.
  • Steven Rado — Hungarian-American author of Aethro-Kinematics; the ideal-gas aether worked out systematically from kinetic theory.
  • William R Jones — American industrial engineer; particulate "gravitino" ether, with an award-winning essay in the push-gravity tradition.
  • Ludwig Kostro — Polish historian and philosopher of science; the standard documentation of Einstein's post-1916 return to an ether concept.
  • Alexander L Kholmetskii — Belarusian physicist; the formal theory of covariant ether theories and the search for phenomena that would distinguish them from special relativity.
  • Francis Viren Fernandes — Indian biochemist and independent theorist; the "186-ether" programme unifying gravity and electromagnetism.
  • John E Chappell — American historian of science and founder of the Natural Philosophy Alliance; the functional definition of the aether, and the historical study of Sagnac.
  • James DeMeo — American biophysicist; the Reichian energetic-aether tradition and the defence of Miller's drift results.
  • Menahem Simhony — Israeli physicist; the epola electron-positron lattice model of space.
  • Ching-Chuan Su — Taiwanese professor of electrical engineering; the nested local-ether model and Quantum Electromagnetics.
  • Duncan W Shaw — Canadian judge turned physical theorist; the "flowing aether" account of gravity, electromagnetism and entanglement.
  • Franco Selleri — Italian theoretical physicist; inertial transformations and the recovery of the Lorentz ether.
  • Valery P Dmitriyev — Russian theorist; both turbulent-fluid and solid-substratum models of the medium.
  • Athanassios A Nassikas — Greek engineer; the minimum-contradictions space-time ether.
  • James Marsen — American engineer; the Tron Theory and the proposal to fly a Michelson-Morley experiment into orbit.

Papers on this wiki

The selection below is organised by the families set out above. It is a fraction of what is held here; the full set of aether pages is at Category:Aether.

Fluid, gas and vortex aethers

Solid, elastic and lattice aethers

Particulate and corpuscular aethers

Electromagnetic-medium aethers

Entrained and local aethers

Lorentzian and preferred-frame aethers

Space-time, vacuum and quantum aethers

The aether and gravitation

Aether drift and experiment

Einstein's ether, history and philosophy

Energetic and free-energy aethers

Critical and sceptical treatments

See also

  • Sagnac Effect — the experiment most often cited here as positive evidence for a medium
  • Relativity — the theory the aether was displaced by
  • GPS — where the competing accounts of light propagation meet an operational system
  • Dayton C Miller — the aether-drift experimentalist whose results remain contested
  • Tesla Technology
  • Galilean Electrodynamics — the journal in which much of this literature appeared
  • Natural Philosophy Alliance — the organisation, now the John Chappell Natural Philosophy Society, whose proceedings supply most of these papers

External links

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