Aether and Vacuous Names

J wants to mention a few scientific examples. Since, as J notes, this all involves induction, and stuff.

--- The wiki entry for phlogiston gives a link to 'ether', so let's see if we can commnt using Grice's notions in 'Vacuous Names' and more importantly on 'vacuous predicates' in "Reply to Richards".

The wiki notes:

"Alchemy, natural philosophy, and early modern physics proposed the existence of a medium of the aether (also spelled ether, from the Greek word (αἰθήρ), meaning "upper air" or "pure, fresh air" [1]), a space-filling substance or field, thought to be necessary as a transmission medium."

"The assorted aether theories embody the various conceptions of this "medium" and "substance"."

"This early modern aether has little in common with the aether of classical elements from which the name was borrowed."

"Although hypotheses of the aether vary somewhat in detail they all have certain characteristics in common."

"Essentially it is considered to be

a physical medium

occupying every point in Space, including within material bodies."

"A second essential feature is that its properties gives rise to the electric and magnetic phenomena and determines the propagation velocity of their effects."

"Therefore the speed of light and all other propagating effects are determined by the physical properties of the aether at the relevant location, analogous to the way that gaseous, liquid and solid media affect the propagation of sound waves."

"The aether is considered the over-all reference frame for the Universe and thus velocities are all absolute relative to its rest frame."

"Therefore, in this view, any physical consequences of those velocities are considered as having an absolute, i. e. real effects."

"Recent aether theories of velocity effects, phenomenon of gravitation and planetary motion (i.e. the angular momentum), creation of proton, of stars (neutron stars too) and planets, etc., exist but are not generally accepted by the mainstream scientific community."

"John Bell, interviewed by Paul Davies in


--------- "The Ghost in the Atom" ------- has suggested that an aether theory might help resolve the EPR paradox by allowing a reference frame in which signals go faster than light[2]."

"Bell suggested Lorentz contraction is perfectly coherent, not inconsistent with relativity, and could produce an aether theory perfectly consistent with the Michelson-Morley experiment."

"Bell suggested that the aether was wrongly rejected on purely philosophical grounds."

Bell wrties:

"What is unobservable does not exist" [p.49]."


"Einstein found the non-aether theory simpler and more elegant, but Bell suggests that doesn't rule it out."

"Besides the arguments based on his interpretation of quantum mechanics, Bell also suggested resurrecting the aether because it is a useful pedagogical device."

"That is, many problems are solved more easily by imagining the existence of an aether."

------ The clearer case, above for Peano-Russell symbolisation (Ex)Ex where E means Ether now.

"In the 19th century, luminiferous aether (or ether), meaning light-bearing aether, was the term used to describe a medium for the propagation of light (electromagnetic radiation)."

"However, a series of increasingly complex experiments had been carried out in the late 1800s like the Michelson-Morley experiment in an attempt to detect the motion of earth through the aether, and had failed to do so."

"A range of proposed aether-dragging theories could explain the null result but these were more complex, and tended to use arbitrary-looking coefficients and physical assumptions."

"Lorentz and FitzGerald offered within the framework of Lorentz ether theory a more elegant solution to how the motion of an absolute aether could be undetectable (length contraction), but if their equations were correct, Albert Einstein's 1905 special theory of relativity could generate the same mathematics without referring to an aether at all."

"This led most physicists to
conclude that the classical notion
of aether was not a useful concept."

-- and possibly 'vacuous'.

"From the 16th until the late 19th century, gravitational phenomena had also been modeled utilizing an aetherial concept."

"The most well-known concept is Le Sage's theory of gravitation. Other concepts were made by Isaac Newton, Bernhard Riemann, Lord Kelvin etc."

""Aether and the theory of relativity"[3] was a title used by Einstein in a lecture on general relativity and aether theory."

"Einstein said that according to general relativity space is endowed with physical properties (the metric field), and




one could use the

word "ether", if one wished, to

refer to this metric field, although

he acknowledged that this meaning

of the word "differs widely from that

of the ether of the mechanical

undulatory theory of light"".

"In particular, the metric field of spacetime has no mechanical properties at all, not even a state of motion or rest. Its parts cannot be tracked over time. [4] The general attitude to this amongst physicists[who?] today is that although it is purely a matter of semantics, Einstein's comments stretch the word "aether" too far."

"It is argued that an "aether" with no mechanical properties doesn't correspond to the historical idea of aether, and so it is potentially misleading to apply this name to the spacetime field of general relativity."

"Quantum mechanics can be used to describe spacetime as being "bitty" at extremely small scales, fluctuating and generating particle pairs that appear and disappear incredibly quickly."

"Instead of being "smooth", the vacuum is described as looking like "quantum foam"."

"It has been suggested that this seething mass of virtual particles may be the equivalent in modern physics of a particulate aether."

"In physics there is no concept considered exactly analogous to the aether."

and in zoology there is no concept considered exactly analogous to Pegasus (a flying stallion).

"However, dark energy is sometimes called quintessence due to its similarity to the classical aether."

"Modern physics is full of concepts such as

free space,
spin foam,
Planck particles,
quantum wave state (QWS),
zero-point energy,
quantum foam, and
vacuum energy.

See also Phlogiston theory, Absolute space and time

References

^ "Aether", American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language.

^ As suggested by Bell, Ribaric and Sustersic used a sort of a Feynman medium to put forward a finite, relativistic theory of quantum scattering of fundamental particles which also resolves the FRD paradox.

^ "A Ridiculously Brief History of Electricity and Magnetism; Mostly from E. T. Whittaker’s A History of the Theories of Aether and Electricity". (PDF format)

^ Ibid.

^ Maxwell, James Clerk, "On Physical Lines of Force". 1861.

^ Albert Einstein, "Ether and the Theory of Relativity" May 5, 1920, University of Leyden. (ed. this version is from "Collected Papers of Albert Einstein")

^ Epple, M. Topology, Matter, and Space, I: Topological Notions in 19th-Century Natural Philosophy. Arch. Hist. Exact Sci. 52 (1998) 297–392.

Further reading

Whittaker, Edmund Taylor (1910), A History of the theories of aether and electricity (1 ed.), Dublin: Longman, Green and Co.,

http://www.archive.org/details/historyoftheorie00whitrich

Schaffner, Kenneth F. (1972), Nineteenth-century aether theories, Oxford: Pergamon Press, ISBN 0-08-015674-6

Darrigol, Olivier (2000), Electrodynamics from Ampére to Einstein, Oxford: Clarendon Press, ISBN 0198505949

Maxwell, James Clerk (1878), "Ether", Encyclopaedia Britannica, Ninth Edition 8: 568–572, http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Encyclop%C3%A6dia_Britannica_Ninth_Edition/Ether

Joseph Larmor, "Ether", Encyclopædia Britannica, Eleventh Edition (1911).

Oliver Lodge, "Ether", Encyclopædia Britannica, Thirteenth Edition (1926).

Albert Einstein, Aether and the theory of relativity (1920) translated in Sidelights on relativity (Dover, NY, 1983; ISBN 0-486-24511-X), pp.1–24 (ed. was an address delivered on May 5, 1920, in the University of Leyden; classes general relativity as a form of (nonparticulate) aether theory)