Well, many of you would have heard of Aether, both in its early scientific use and is rather more vague use as a mysterious sand magical substance today. However, at some stage it seems to have been a prevailing and logical theory explaining light’s propagation. Is there any evidence for any scientist realistically attempting to use this aether either for the purposes of propulsion in air, space, etc.
Of course there are many movie and steampunk examples of aether propellers etc, but I’m talking about legitimate period scientists who spoke about harnessing aether as scientists would today talk about harnessing the atom, or antimatter, or even dark matter.
No. More modern theories of electromagnetism did away with the need for a medium through which the waves propagate, so the concept of an ether, or aether, has been discarded. Any reputable scientist who suggested taking it seriously would be laughed out of a career.
Edit: Sorry, I misread. I’ll leave this up here anyway so people can point and laugh.
Aether was entirely theoretical. They knew there had to be some substance out there (because light couldn’t travel through a vacuum), but didn’t have any idea what it was or what it was like. Consider it the late 19th/early 20th century version of Dark Matter.
To maybe save Smeghead’s post, instead of pointing and laughing, the discarding of the aether concept happened long before space travel of any kind, where an aether would be useful to push against. On Earth, of course, you have the ground or water or wind, so using something even more… ethereal… to push against wouldn’t be very useful.
There was some discussion of mining the aether for its valuable properties, but scientists couldn’t agree on whether it would be practical. It was kind of an aether/ore thing.
Aether is from a time when they didn’t know light could travel through a vacuum. His post was representing the views of that time, not his actual current beliefs.
Isn’t it because there is no aether, that allows ion thruster technologies to work in the vacuum of space. It ionizes matter (gives an atom an electric charge; more or less electrons than protons), provided from solar or nuclear energy, and these extra electrons fly off in one direction which provides reaction mass that enable a ship or probe to go the opposite direction, indefinitely.
Hagen asks if any serious scientists ever attempted such practical uses of the aether as propulsion. The aether was mainstream science, for a while. One of the details was aether dragging. I think it’s obvious that a dragging interaction could be used for propulsion, so I think scientists must have thought about it (though I don’t know of any such thoughts in the record).
So, I think the answer is “probably, or at least did a little scouting thought for this purpose”.
[QUOTE=Professor A. E. Dolbear, Ph.D., “Matter, Ether and Motion”, 1894, page 154:
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If there are inhabitants in Mars they are as unable to traverse space as we are; and the possibility of our yet being able to do that is not half so unlikely as it seemed to be but a very few years ago, since it evidently requires for accomplishment but a directed reaction against the ether; and we already know how to produce the reaction by electrical means; and every point in space has the energy for transformation.
It is generally agreed that the so-called attraction of a magnet for its armature is really due to the pressure of the ether upon the latter, and it may be as great as two hundred pounds to the square inch.
An electro-magnet without an armature is therefore reacted upon by the ether to that degree. When this reaction can in any way be neutralized at one pole and not at the other, the ether reaction will push the magnet backwards, and the navigation of space will at once become mechanically possible.
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To bad his idea doesn’t work, it sounds more maneuverable than using rockets.
The (so far) fictional dimension that the Star Trek universe calls ‘subspace’ is akin to the luminiferous aether of old timey physicists, in that it’s an unseeable, undetectable ‘plane’ of space that nonetheless exists and can be used to skirt Newtonian laws.
Modern Quantum Physics starts to border on philosophy when it gets down to hypothetical things such as string theory and membranes. They start to become similar to the æther in that their existence is mostly based on the,* “Well, everything else will make sense if this one magical, totally unprovable thing exists!”*
Chronos forgive me, but my long-lost remembrances of quantum physics class, didn’t … didn’t… I don’t know who. Bohm? Wasn’t a body of his work based on equations virtually pushing particles along until the wave function collapsed underneath them and they fell into the turtle pit?
