Richard Dawkins says American religion holds back science

[GIGObuster]

Oh boy, not this again.

Link to the thread that shows how an opinion is not science, even if it is coming from a physicist.

Physicists - so, how is the Higgs Field NOT ether?!

Of particular importance are these posts:

@leahcim

In a way, Maxwell’s equations are the first that specifically deny ether. Maxwell came up these equations the describe electromagnetism very well, but aren’t invariant under Galilei transforms. In particular they describe electromagnetic waves that travel at some speed “c” – Not “c relative to some reference frame”, just “c”.

The conservative thing to say was “well, Maxwell’s equations must only be right in some reference frame (at rest relative to the ether)” and start looking to figure out what that reference frame was. As we know, that search failed, and with relativity we essentially said, “Maxwell’s equations are even better than expected, because they are true in all reference frames, not just some preferred one”.

Maxwell’s equations were made at a time when ether seemed sensible, but got better thereafter.

@Chronos

All fields pervade all of space-time. That’s what a field is. Some of them might have zero value, or nearly zero value, in some places, but the field is still there.

If you insist on pointing to something in modern physics and saying “Look, physicists still believe in ether!”, then point to dark energy. One name for dark energy (or rather, for one relatively common model for dark energy) is “quintessence”, which literally means “fifth element”, a reference to ether (or alternately, to Mila Jovovich, who looks a lot better with her shirt off than ether does).

But the concept of “ether” has changed dramatically throughout history, with so far as I can tell the only common thread being “stuff that we don’t know much about”. By the time of Maxwell, the defining feature of “ether” was its stillness: It was the stationary reference frame that the speed of light was measured relative to. But in the original Greek notion, its defining feature was its lack of stillness: Ether was the ever-moving, which made up the stars, and accounted for their perpetual motion through the sky.

Now, if you do decide to latch onto that common historical thread and define “ether” as “that which we don’t understand very well”, then there will of course always be ether, but it won’t always be the same stuff. I’m not sure that’s a very useful definition, though.