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My personal favorite "old science" theory: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luminiferous_aether https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luminiferous_aether > Luminifero
by _bxg1 6y ago
My personal favorite "old science" theory: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luminiferous_aether https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luminiferous_aether
> Luminiferous aether or ether[1] ("luminiferous", meaning "light-bearing") was the postulated medium for the propagation of light.[2] It was invoked to explain the ability of the apparently wave-based light to propagate through empty space, something that waves should not be able to do. The assumption of a spatial plenum of luminiferous aether, rather than a spatial vacuum, provided the theoretical medium that was required by wave theories of light.
> The aether hypothesis was the topic of considerable debate throughout its history, as it required the existence of an invisible and infinite material with no interaction with physical objects.
I found out about it by way of a novel taking place in the 1800s (written in modern times): https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/22929563-the-watchmaker-of-filigree-street https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/22929563-the-watchmaker-...
- empath75 6y agoIt’s not all that far off from the electromagnetic field.
- jshevek 6y agoI think it is. Electric and magnetic fields exist in relationship with the processes that create and shape them. There is no prerequisite "background electromagnetic field" that is universally necessary for all of those processes, to begin with.
- empath75 6y agoThe primary difference is that the aether was supposed to provide a universal rest frame, which we now know doesn’t exist, but quantum field theory does posit that the field is a fundamental medium and the particles exist only as perturbations in that field.
- DiabloD3 6y agoNot only that, cosmic plasma filaments carrying charged dust around is the most likely explanation for the "missing" matter and energy that two Nobels were handed out for the, continued, non-discovery. I do not understand why the Aether was ridiculed, but Dark (Matter|Energy) are not. They both depend on something we can't see or detect in any way, and Occam's Razor dictates that, without further evidence, I have to consider the least complex explanation the probably correct one: Plasma physics is a well understood field that involves the Electromagnetic force, and Cosmology has simply neglected to understand how large plasma currents can scale to. The irony is, Hannes Alfvén (1970 Nobel Prize winner for his work on Magnetohydrodynamics, also had significant contributions to space science) basically stated that this is the most likely cause of coronal heating, based on the earlier work of Kristian Birkeland (nominated for the Nobel 7 times)... gigantic plasma currents slamming into the Sun at it's polar regions, much like how the Solar magnetic field slams into us at our poles and causes high energy plasma events known as the Aurora.
- projektfu 6y agoTechnically you can detect dark matter because the motions of things don’t add up based on radiative matter. But that doesn’t really explain it.
- QuesnayJr 6y agoIt's wrong to ridicule aether. It was a theory, the theory was tested, and it turned out to be wrong. Lots of theories are wrong. It's not like scientists at the time were stupid. James Clerk Maxwell believed that an aether was required, and he was literally the first person to write down the full set of equations for electromagnetism. Occam's razor doesn't tell us that aether is less parsimonious than "Literally, time slows down when you go faster. Also, light is a particle and a wave at the same time. Kind of." Aether suffered from clear problems as an idea as the long list of weird properties it had to satisfy, and the list only got longer and longer. Dark matter isn't like that at all -- it's easy to add to our theories that there's a particle that is invisible but has mass. There's no Michaelson-Morley experiment that's extremely hard to explain.
- buzzkillington 6y agoIt really is. Fields don't exist until something waves in them. Aether was something to be waved.
- jbay808 6y agoMy favourite factoid about the aether theory is that Faraday found it implausible, on the basis that he couldn't conceive of a fluid medium that could propagate transverse waves evenly in all directions, but not longitudinal waves in any direction.
- hedora 6y agoIt’s also the namesake of ethernet.
- DonHopkins 6y agoAnd before Ethernet, there was Chaosnet! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaosnet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaosnet Define by CHAOS ORDER: http://sv.svensson.org/SYSDOC%3BCHAORD http://sv.svensson.org/SYSDOC%3BCHAORD
- a1369209993 6y ago> Data grams seem to have a bug that the two parties can never > agree on whether they both agree that it really happened. Am I losing? Oh, hey, byzantine generals problem.
- klenwell 6y agoMy favorite is the erroneous theory of immunization that informed Pasteur's successful development of a vaccine: Accordingly, why was Pasteur such a genius as to discern how the immune system functions to protect us against invasion by the microbial world when no one had even made the distinction between fungi, bacteria, or viruses, and no one had formulated any theories of immunity. A careful reading of Pasteur’s presentations to the Academy of Sciences reveals that Pasteur was entirely mistaken as to how immunity occurs, in that he reasoned, as a good microbiologist would, that appropriately attenuated microbes would deplete the host of vital trace nutrients absolutely required for their viability and growth, and not an active response on the part of the host. Even so, he focused attention on immunity, preparing the ground for others who followed. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3342039/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3342039/ I had heard this years ago and recently was trying to place it. I finally tracked down a credible source.
- yongjik 6y agoIt wasn't that far-fetched as it sounds now: using Maxwell's equation, one can easily derive the speed of light, c. But then the question is: speed relative to what? Because Maxwell's equation doesn't tell exactly what it is relative to. But, as we all know, speed is relative, so it must be relative to something - then the something ought to be the medium for light. So people started looking for it - and it refused to show up even when it should! The famous Michelson–Morley experiment. Of course, it was resolved by theory of relativity: it turns out the speed of light is relative to everything! You just have to slow down time itself, no big deal.
- hansbo 6y agoI always found this fascinating. The enormous shift in physics that occurred in the early 20th century must have been so exciting to experience first hand.
- mudita 6y agoIt seems like it had a lasting psychological impact on the thinking of the generation of scientists, who lived through this radical revolution . I found very interesting this moment in an interview with Freeman Dyson, where he describes the difference in thinking between two generations of scientists around 1950 (Oppenheimer, Bohr, Heisenberg… vs. Feynman, Schwinger…): "they lived through this radical revolution of quantum electrodynamics, which was so successful, they wanted to have something like that again" "each of them had radical proposals, which turned out to be totally useless and in the meantime it was the young people who actually were the conservatives" https://youtu.be/N44DZJW4LSw?t=67 https://youtu.be/N44DZJW4LSw?t=67 The whole interview is very much worth watching, also from a historical perspective.
- Ono-Sendai 6y agoThe aether exists, we just call it the electromagnetic field.
- fsh 6y agoThe very idea of special relativity is that EM-fields exist without an aether.