Vinaire's Blog

My recent realization has been that the concept of “ether” was discarded not only by Einstein but also by Faraday and Maxwell.

The concept of “ether” that was discarded was a “medium in which light traveled as a wave.” 

Faraday replaced that “ether” by the concept of a field of force. Maxwell gave that field the sense of being an electromagnetic substance. Light became this electromagnetic substance instead of being a disturbance in some static medium.

Einstein then added further meat to that electromagnetic substance, which varied up and down the electromagnetic spectrum. He recognized the property of the momentum of radiation and equated it with the momentum of matter to come up with famous energy-matter equivalence. 

But Einstein assumed the electromagnetic substance to exist in the form of small or large discrete energy-packets in space. There is no reason why momentum of radiation cannot be viewed as coming from the consistency of a fluid-like continuum view of energy. It does not change the mathematics. See the above excerpt from Einstein’s autobiographical notes.

The consistency of a fluid-like continuum of energy can express a quantum just as well as a point-like discrete energy-packet in space.

Now we can go back to the ancient view of “ether” as being the substance of space itself. We may now associate that with the Higgs field. The secret of gravitation may now be explored through the Higgs field.

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