Luminiferous Aether - Sink or Swim?

Einstein continued that special relativity does not necessarily rule out the aether, because the latter can be used to give physical reality to acceleration and rotation.

this quote on the "Luminiferous Aether" Wikipedia sparked a train of thought that i think i grasp well enough to ask some questions for the experts..

first off, correct me if I'm missing something, but it seems to me that the variable of space/time seems to be self-contradictory.. "time" can only be experienced as change in Matter and cannot be seen to take place in a vacuum besides the effect of gravity has on matter and so it seems that the variable should be defined as matter/time..

secondly, can Space be defined as an example of "pure potentiality" in the way that ANY particle OR photon may occupy this space? Not to mention certain particles can be "conjured up" in a space, given the right circumstances (LHC and other colliders seem to be an example of this) so Space could possibly be seen as a literal demonstration of the duality between Zero and Infinity..? it seems to represent "zero" in the way of seeming to "contain" nothing.. but represents "Infinity" in the way that ANYTHING probable enough to exist, CAN exist within it..

lastly, do physicists define Photons as having the quality of projecting a spherical field of energy, rather than saying they have "a direction"..? I'm speaking from a layman's point of view, informed entirely by independent study, but it seems like the current model is very hung up on the "direction of particles" and the "propagation of waves" but neither are experienced without the observer being in the right place, at the right time.. obviously if i am looking directly at the lightbulb of a lamp, it seems that the photons travel from the bulb in a linear direction, towards my eyeball.. but if that were so, how would someone in the next room see that light affecting walls in the hallway, etc..? Has science begun thinking about the universe, as it would appear from a TRULY objective point-of-view..?
Not that a "truly objective point of view" could be accomplished in a lab, but I would think that it would be a good use of theoretical physics to begin trying to map the universe from this point of view so that we might come to understand and calculate events from Multiple points of view simultaneously...

anyhow, if I'm missing something please feel free to correct! any helpful answers would be appreciated

HyphenSt1
obviously if i am looking directly at the lightbulb of a lamp, it seems that the photons travel from the bulb in a linear direction, towards my eyeball.. but if that were so, how would someone in the next room see that light affecting walls in the hallway, etc..? Has science begun thinking about the universe, as it would appear from a TRULY objective point-of-view..?

The light is not just going directly from the bulb into into your eyeball; most is not, and much of that light reflects off the surfaces it encounters, some of which them makes its way to your eye, as discussed in this humorous Feyman explanation:

Richard Feynman on hungry philosophers (or do we see objects or only their light)


Feynman questioned a lot as most scientists do, and they try to be objective. You should watch his lectures if you want to learn more abut photons. They are on youtube and give you some insight into the scientific process because he talks about the questions he and others asked.

But if you find something everyone else has overlooked because they weren't being objective enough, you may get a Nobel prize out of it, if you can prove it. It wasn't easy for Einstein to prove physics had been wrong for centuries and that he was right, but he did prove it, with some help. This is how science works.

HyphenSt1
first off, correct me if I'm missing something, but it seems to me that the variable of space/time seems to be self-contradictory.. "time" can only be experienced as change in Matter and cannot be seen to take place in a vacuum besides the effect of gravity has on matter and so it seems that the variable should be defined as matter/time..

You have a point that curved spacetime is curved because of matter, so you could call it "space-time curved by matter". Mass does factor into it. You could call it different things as long as everyone agrees on what to call it. We still refer to "electron orbitals" even though we know electrons don't really orbit the nucleus. We could make a whole dictionary of terms that could be refined...but most are too established to realistically change them.

reply to post by Arbitrageur


hahahaha

I loved that video!
I definitely agree that philosophizing in this realm borders on being self-defeating, but as you said, sometimes it only takes a slightly different perspective or re-definition of terms, to revolutionize our theory. I'm just wondering if mathematics and physics could benefit from mapping the behavior of an object without the bias of perspective and possibly solve the wave/particle duality by simply re-defining
I'm not someone who usually thinks of "application" first, so much as I "overthink my dinner" so to speak.. until I'm very "hungry".. and then kinda end up seeing things from different angles until I have a few hundred questions that I can't answer with my archive of "common knowledge" (I could easily say that all of my threads are the product of this cycle haha) and am forced to innovate hypotheses that could possibly account for it.. next step then being trying to bounce those hypotheses off my respected peers and vaults of information (ATS ) and go from there!

I'm most interested in expanding the frontier which humanity can explore and learn from.. everything from communication to artistic expression would be dramatically revolutionized were a "unified field theory" to become simple enough anyone could understand it..
I do love hearing and reading about science in small doses but i find that i usually end up with more questions than i began with haha, so i must pace myself. I hate to be one of those folks that claim to know the answers instead of being confident they know they right questions...

thank you for your response and information!

reply to post by HyphenSt1


Interesting... Reminded me of something I read previously regarding roughly the same topic.

Have you bumped into speculations on the nature and structure of the universe by Donald L. Hotson? He seems to elaborate on the concept "luminiferous aether".

The three part article is titled "Dirac’s Equation and the Sea of Negative Energy"

Hotson - Part 1
Hotson - Part 2
Hotson - Part 3: Structure and Unification

HyphenSt1
I'm just wondering if mathematics and physics could benefit from mapping the behavior of an object without the bias of perspective .....

I'm most interested in expanding the frontier which humanity can explore and learn from.. everything from communication to artistic expression would be dramatically revolutionized were a "unified field theory" to become simple enough anyone could understand it..

Glad you liked the video. Feynman takes what can be a dry subject and adds some interesting anecdotes to try to make it not so dry, which you just saw an example of, which is why I like his lectures.

Do you see any contradiction in the above two statements of yours that I quoted? First you talk about "without bias" but then you interject a bias about "a "unified field theory" to become simple enough anyone could understand it". Feynman also addressed this topic, and urged us to set such bias aside, meaning we shouldn't have preconceived notions about how simple or complex nature is, rather we should observe it to the best of our ability and then try to understand it to the best of our ability, wherever this leads us. If it turns out to be simple, so be it, or if it turns out to be complex, then let's let's not allow a bias that we'd like it to be simple distort our perspective. You'll hear him talk about this in his own words at 2:20 in this video (though the whole 5 minutes is worth watching) and you can see this Feynman thought about this "bias" issue:

Richard Feynman - Philosophy of Life and the Beauty of a Flower.


I think you might like this video even more than the first one but you can let me know. There's another version where you can see him talking but in this version someone substituted beautiful scenery for the video, which fits what he's talking about to a degree. He talks about on his appreciation of beauty which is related to the artistic expression topic you mentioned.