“According to the general theory of relativity space without ether is unthinkable”
“the state of the [ether] is at every place determined by connections with the matter and the state of the ether in neighbouring places”
The state of the aether at every place determined by connections with the matter and the state of the aether in neighboring places is the state of displacement of the aether.
I was definitely looking to understand what “ether” and the Higgs Field had in common - conceptually and in terms of the type of inertial drag implied by having some form of substrate involved in our universe.
I could do without a bit of the snark from some posters, but my whole intent was to hear from Real Scientists™, who could talk about this at a Neil DeGrasse Tyson-for-civilians sort of way.
I wasn’t looking to argue with the SDMB Real Scientists.
mpc755 - what’cha doin’ there, dude? Some of your quotes sound interesting and supportive of what I was looking to learn more about, but I’d sure as heck spend a bit more time trying to understand where the science professionals are pointing out issues.
Yes, science is about overcoming old views when data demands otherwise, but that does not appear to be what is going on here…
People like Tyson are rare. I would ask someone who teaches History of Science or Philosophy of Science, and has a good reputation as an instructor. They would have both the knowledge and ability to explain it to you in layman’s terms. They might also give a rat’s ass about helping you understanding it, rather than being condescending or obfuscating.
All true - and I do seek out that type of input where I can. But I love the SDMB for this type of stuff, and am willing to deal with the snark along the way.
I just don’t want this to deteriorate into a “Jimi Hendrix was murdered, I tells ya!!!” sort of thread (I assume you saw that one - oy), where one voice insists on a specific view when other credible posters are having none of it. If there is a dialogue to be had, great - njtt was gettin’ all NDTyson with some of the context he/she was providing (thank you!) - that’s part of a cool discussion I was hoping would happen…
“The word ‘ether’ has extremely negative connotations in theoretical physics because of its past association with opposition to relativity. This is unfortunate because, stripped of these connotations, it rather nicely captures the way most physicists actually think about the vacuum. . . . Relativity actually says nothing about the existence or nonexistence of matter pervading the universe, only that any such matter must have relativistic symmetry. […] It turns out that such matter exists. About the time relativity was becoming accepted, studies of radioactivity began showing that the empty vacuum of space had spectroscopic structure similar to that of ordinary quantum solids and fluids. Subsequent studies with large particle accelerators have now led us to understand that space is more like a piece of window glass than ideal Newtonian emptiness. It is filled with ‘stuff’ that is normally transparent but can be made visible by hitting it sufficiently hard to knock out a part. The modern concept of the vacuum of space, confirmed every day by experiment, is a relativistic ether. But we do not call it this because it is taboo.” - Robert B. Laughlin, Nobel Laureate in Physics, endowed chair in physics, Stanford University
Those scientists you refer to are in denial of understanding matter, fluids, solids, a piece of window glass and ‘stuff’ have mass and so does the aether.
I don’t know about “a good reputation as an instructor”, but I am someone who used to teach both history of science and philosophy of science, and I have already tried to answer the OP’s question, which largely on the basis of that experience (and the education that prepared me for it).
No need to stop posting. I am just looking for a discussion/exchange of ideas to elicit greater clarity.
That quote, from an apparently very credible source, is fascinating and gets EXACTLY at the concept I was going for in the OP - that a “form” of ether - a substrate of stuff of some nature - continues to be a relevant model to use in contemplating the structure of things.
I started another thread to not stomp on this one, however, since you are okay with me continuing here I will post the following as I think it is relevant.
‘Liquid spacetime: A very slippery superfluid, that’s what spacetime could be like’
“What if spacetime were a kind of fluid?”
If spacetime were a kind of fluid then particles would move through it and displace it.
If spacetime were a kind of fluid then it would be what waves in a double slit experiment.
If only we had some evidence that mass fills ‘empty’ space. Then it should be obvious to everyone that it is the mass which fills ‘empty’ space which waves in a double slit experiment.
Let’s see if what the experts say about Dr. Stanford Nobel’s comment on ether.
Doper Physicists: Is this acclaimed physicist’s comment being taken out of context or being misrepresented? If not, how does this statement relate to what I am trying to explore in the OP/this thread?
Oh, good lord. What a mess. mpc755 I had no idea that my question in this thread’s OP was the equivalent of saying “Beetlejuice! Beetlejuice! Beetlejuice!” to invoke you.
And just cutting and pasting the same stuff over and over - and then doing it again in this thread - that’s just plain rude.
You aren’t demonstrating the ability to listen and you use your re-quotes to try to shout over other people. I am glad you started your own thread - good luck with it.
Actually, it’s not OK for you continue here. If you’ve started another thread, then you can present your ideas there. There’s no need to continue to derail this one.
Returning to the topic: A ‘field’ in physics is simply a function (with values that are scalars, vectors, or something more complicated) defined over time and space. The most familiar example is the classical electromagnetic field from a stationary point charge, which exists everywhere in space and time. (Specifically, it’s a vector field pointing toward the charge with magnitude varying as 1/r^2.) A particle travelling through a universe with such a charge is travelling through a field, but it’s inaccurate to say that it’s travelling through anything like an aether. In quantum field theory, there are fields are composed of operators that create and annihilate particles. And so on.
So, how are aether and the Higgs field different? Aether was proposed as a medium for light to travel through (as opposed to a vacuum) and as a way to shoehorn relativistic results into a Newtonian framework. It doesn’t work: There have been no experiments successfully detecting an aether, and no theoretical way of salvaging it as a defensible theory. The Higgs particle was conjectured as a way of solving a technical problem about forces mediated by massive gauge bosons. (In particular, it has nothing to do with relativity or light or gravity.) The particle was theorized in the 60s, some of its properties worked out later, and it was discovered a couple of years ago.
The Higgs field isn’t a medium that particles are propagating through, like light moving through a gas; the Higgs particle is an excitation of that field. There really isn’t a classical analogue to this process. At some point, you can’t really talk about this sort of thing without introducing a huge amount of background and dealing with the math and physics directly; it’s not explicable through analogies or appeal to classical intuition.
Certainly classical proponents of aether theories weren’t thinking of anything remotely similar to the Higgs field; this was far before anyone had heard anything about quantum field theory, weak interactions, Goldstone bosons, gauge theory, etc. It would be like saying that ancient Greek philosophy about “atoms” had anything whatsoever to do with the modern, experimentally confirmed and theoretically sound notions of protons, neutrons, and electrons (the first both composed of smaler particles) bound together in a somewhat stable state and forming larger molecules through chemical bonds. Atoms aren’t indivisible (despite the name), irreducible, or necessarily stable. It’s just a name scavenged from the dustbin of history. (Gell-Mann was brilliant in deliberately choosing a nonsense word for quarks, to avoid any sort of philosophical or historical baggage.
Itself - that is really great; thank you. I was watching Cosmos with my son last night and the reference to Democritus postulating atoms in Ancient Greece was made. This led to a discussion of that philosophical discussion vs. what came to be called “atoms” in the physics of the late 1800’s/early 1900’s - and this thread.
So, how do you process it when Physicists invoke ether in discussions of Higgs Bosons and Fields? A lot of the quotes shared are from well-respected scientists - are they just grasping at analogies to appease questions from civilians - dumbing it down to an extreme? It feels like they are implying a bit more than that…
Wittgenstein (I think) coined the concept of family resemblances: not all of the things we bestow the same name on actually have any defining property in common (i.e. they’re not all members of some set A where A is the set of all things having property p); rather, they’re kinda like something that’s kinda like something that’s kinda like something that originally bore the name (that may be a tad simplified). So, we can intelligibly talk about a sort of modern ‘ether’ without that ether having any real conceptual connection to, say, the Aristotelian notion, but we must not loose track of the fact that the concept has evolved, and we’re reasoning fallaciously when we attempt to shoehorn the modern concept into Aristotelian metaphysics (e.g.).
So I would think that one can take those physicists to be talking about ether in such an evolved sense, and that anybody claiming that such talk vindicates ether theories of yore is simply applying the concept in an inappropriate context. (And of course, sometimes even distinguished scientists are just full of shit.) To this extent, then, even if there are modern ether theories (such as the ones I outlined in my last post), this doesn’t mean that ‘Einstein was wrong’ or ‘luminiferous ether theorists were right’.
And often enough, it’s just a matter of terminology: Einstein himself often spoke of the gravitational field of General Relativity as an ether, since GR effectively bestows physical qualities on spacetime; but conventionally, he and his theories are seen as abolishing the notion of ether. Both Einsteins use of ‘ether’ in this instance and the ether his theories are supposed to have abolished must therefore be diametrically opposed, and nevertheless, both likewise have an obvious continuity with earlier notions. Thus, such differences may not be substantial, but merely terminological.
And again, if you’re going to say that something is “like ether”, then you have to say which ether it is you’re talking about, since the 19th-century concept of ether is about as unlike the classical concept of ether as it’s possible to be.
It’s just an analogy and an attempt to tie a complicated, abstract particle physics concept to something that most people have at least heard of. (Nor, for that matter, is the Higgs responsible for all mass, which breaks the analogy with ether even further. The mass of the proton is almost two orders of magnitude larger than the sum of the mass of the corresponding quarks, and that extra contribution is not a result of the Higgs.)