Can we back up a bit?
What is the importance of Aether? How does it prove or disprove the Geocentric model? Or Heliocentric model?
Thanks!
The word ‘ether’ is not used much these days except when referring to the colourless volatile liquid known by that name. The concept of ether has been accepted since the time of Aristotle at least and was also acknowledged by the Fathers of the Church and indeed entered their discussion on the interpretation of the heavens and ‘firmament’ of Genesis. Ether or aether was considered omnipresent throughout all space (including the Earth’s atmosphere), and that it may even interpenetrate matter. It is however, difficult to rationalise with ether, for it has always remained outside known scientific certainty. It was considered a medium through which all the properties of electromagnetism, that is, light and heat from the sun etc., can travel, but more demonstrably the medium for sound, for sound cannot pass through a vacuum.
Our interest in ether goes back to Isaac Newton and his theory of gravitation. He proposed matter attracts and that this principle explains his theory of heliocentrism with the bigger mass of the sun supposedly attracting all smaller cosmic bodies around it causing these in turn to move about the sun in elliptical orbits. ‘Action at a distance’ Newton called it. ‘Ghost fingers,’ ‘invisible hands’ and ‘spooky,’ others called it, but no one could say how this ‘attraction’ worked across millions of miles of space. Some concluded that Newton’s gravitational pull had to operate through the ether of space. Ironically, Newton conducted a test that he believed showed that there is no such thing as ether.
‘If space is really empty how is it that the sun and moon exercise influence over the Earth? Technical action at a distance is impossible. A body can only act immediately on what it is in contact with; it must be by the action of contiguous particles – that is, through a continuous medium, that force can be transmitted across space. Radiation is not the only thing the Earth feels from the sun; there is in addition its gigantic gravitational pull, a force or tension more than what a trillion steel rods, each seventeen feet in diameter, could stand. What mechanism transmits this gigantic force?’[1]You tell us Sir Oliver, you’re the Newtonian with your ‘gigantic gravitational pull across space.’ To keep Newton’s theories alive they had to call upon ether, a fixed agent in which the universe resides and through which moving celestial bodies and radiation can move. Accordingly, the very existence and behaviour of ether in space had to be investigated.
[1] Sir O. Lodge: Ether of Space, Harper, London & New York, 1909, p.26.The nineteenth century saw the beginning of many experiments trying to determine the presence and nature of ether on Earth and in space. Assuming the Earth moves around the sun at 67,000mph it was thought the ether – due to the aberration effect - would cause a split-starlight beam to move out of focus as the Earth turned away from it during orbit. This result was looked for without any success. In 1818 the physicist Augustin Fresnel suggested a possible reason for this Earthmoving failure. He proposed the ether is thicker around matter and less dense away from it in space. Thus the tool used in the test had dragged ether along with it as it moved through space giving a nil result.
The next test was to see if ether could be detected in a fairly dense material that was itself moving. The physicist Armand Fizeau conducted such a trial in 1859. Pumping water through a tube that did a u-turn, he sent two beams of light, one with the flow, and the other against the flow, for an equal distance. The beams used did not return in phase indicating the ‘Fresnel drag coefficient’ might have some experimental support after all. Alas, many factors had to be assumed to reach such a conclusion and as we have said again and again, assumptions are not facts. ‘Ether drag’ was only a possibility if the ether exists and behaves, as they thought it might.
Other physicists then joined the quest. Thomas Young supposed the ether in the neighbourhood of the Earth to be stationary while Sir George Stokes again said the Earth dragged it. Planck showed that Stokes’s theory could be saved if extraordinary assumptions are made such as that ether is compressible like a gas and also subject to gravity. Lorentz worked out a theory whereby the Earth imparted to the ether in its neighbourhood, not the whole of its velocity, but only a fraction of it. Hertz supposed that within matter the ether takes part in the motion of matter, and it is also moving in space free from matter, if you know what he meant. In 1871, when the Airy experiment using two telescopes showed that stellar aberration indicated the Earth did not move, the ether drag theory was immediately re-proposed in order to get the Earth moving again. But proposing is not proving. Proof for the presence of ether eluded science. Scientists were left wondering what is the true nature of the medium that man presumed carries or propagates waves, particles and whatever?
Then there was electromagnetism, all of its phenomena travelling through space at 186,200 mph. Any progress of science demanded investigation into the agency through which these electromagnetic waves (or pulses) were thought to propagate. This medium, all believed, had to be that known as ‘ether of space’ or ‘luminiferous (light-bearing) ether’ as Maxwell called it. In the late 1860s German born American physicist Albert A. Michelson (1852-1931) decided to re-enact an experiment performed by Martinus Hoek in 1868 to see if it was possible to detect the orbital movement of the Earth using what he called an interferometer. Hoek failed to find any movement but Michelson believed he could do better. With the financial help of Alexander Bell, inventor of the telephone, they rebuilt their own machine that he believed would detect the ether as the Earth supposedly flies through space orbiting the sun.
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