The Case Against The Word Aether

[ohwilleke]

The Case Against The Word "Aether"

Many BSM theories involve a space-time that has properties rather than being "nothing" or omnipresent field or substance, but the word "aether" as a description for that "non-nothing" vacuum between Standard Model particles is long past its due date as a matter of written style.

I elaborate further and more emphatically on this notion at the following blog post: http://dispatchesfromturtleisland.blogspot.com/2013/06/a-style-note-for-would-be-einsteins.html

[T]he term "aether" jumped the shark a couple of decades before the Happy Days episode in 1977 that gave rise to this expression aired. Despite the fact that Albert Einstein used the term himself in published works as late as 1930 and that Paul Dirac published a paper using the term to describe a similar concept as late as 1951, this term is no longer in current usage as a scientific term used by legitimate physicists and hasn't been since the late 1950s.

Today, this term is very strongly associated with a very particular kind of 19th century luminiferous aether theory that was definitively disproven with a many experiments conducted by multiple investigators that were replicated with increasing precision from 1810 to 1935. As a result, the luminiferous aether theory is synonymous in contemporary physics writing by professional physicists with pseudoscience. "Aether" is to physicists what Young Earth Creationism is in the fields of biology and geology. Thus, from a P.R./marketing/credibility perspective, it is hard to imagine a worse choice of name for the medium of space-time than aether by anyone trying to seriously and sincerely advance a scientific hypothesis about physics.

While many "new physics" modern gravitation/dark energy/dark matter theories proposed by professional physicists (and indeed general relativity itself) treat the fabric of space-time as something that has properties rather than being "nothing", using the term "aether" for that medium is the rhetorical equivalent of calling yourself a crackpot.

 

[Demystifier]

Most of these authors are not crackpots:
http://arxiv.org/find/gr-qc/1/ti:+OR+ether+aether/0/1/0/all/0/1

 

[Paulibus]

I agree that the 19th century idea of a 'luminiferous aether' has no foundation in observation or experiment, but I'm not so sure that 'legitimate physicists' shouldn't now and then remember how this concept was used to enable the propagation of electromagnetic waves through the Vacuum. It did so by inventing a continuum that sustained action-at-a-distance, even if this were infinitesimal distances. Indeed this concept (perhaps like quantum entanglement?) still seems to me essential for propagating any disturbances over spacetime intervals, no matter how tiny they are.

A possible example of a modern toy 'ether' might be imagined inside a large dollop of liquid metal, say lithium at 200 C. Here the valence electrons of its constituent atoms (1 per atom for simple Li) are delocalised into a uniform continuum of mass and charge over the entire liquid volume. Such a continuum could, I guess, sustain various wave-like disturbances carrying charge, energy and momentum, while any motion the continuum had relative to an 'inside observer' (if any such existed) could be difficult to define and detect. Michelson and Morley should rest easily?