3 ms·
Isn't every "field" in QFT basically an aether?
by NotAnEconomist 8y ago
Isn't every "field" in QFT basically an aether?
- raattgift 8y agoPlease tell me what you mean by aether, as rigorously as you can, and then I can give you an answer to the question which seems to be bedevilling you. Meanwhile I can guess at what you're asking: The Standard Model (a QFT) has interacting quantum fields obeying purely local dynamics. The behaviour "here-and-now" depends on the field-values "here". It does not depend on field-values "now" but far from "here". Moreover, the Standard Model is Lorentz-invariant, meaning its laws hold in any inertial frame of reference, thus the scare quotes in the previous sentence. The luminiferous aether that Michelson & Morley were looking to measure was motivated by finding a single special (and universal, or at least covering the whole solar system) inertial frame of reference in which Maxwell's equations hold exactly. No such frame exists; there is a huge democracy of inertial frames in which relativistic electrodynamics is exact in the classical limit. ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preferred_frame https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preferred_frame )