Aether... or how I learned to love Supersymmetric String Theory
If you were to write of the history of aether -the anomalous luminiferous substance that fills all voids- it would probably follow something like Joseph Campbell's “Hero’s Journey”: there is the “Call to Adventure”, which is the philosopher cum scientist’s call to describe some phenomena desperately needed for some explanation. From an empirical and scientific perspective, I would imagine it could start as Aristotle’s “Hand of God”, the basic explanation for describing inertia: he likens the reason why the thrown ball continues on its journey is that there is an unmeasurable force which guides the ball to its final destination. This explanation would last for quite some time, like hundreds of years.
Then comes “The Threshold”! Wait! Galileo? Why did you do this inertia experiment? That ball that fell from the top of the moving sailboat did *not* fall in a straight line? In the words of Diondre Cole on SNL, What’s Up With That? The “Hand of God” now moves in mysterious parabolic ways? Questions ensue, doubt is sown, and for hundreds of years later, aether becomes baked into everything ranging from Newton's “Action at a distance”, to Maxwell's EM propagation and Tesla’s induction. We think we need this, but not really sure why, and we’re not entirely sure what it does and how it does it. Not much else to see here for a hundred years or so.
Then comes “The Abyss”: the Michelson and Morley Experiment, and, to make it worse, a curb-stomping by Einstein who says, ala Fred Sanford, “No, you dummy”... there is no luminiferous aether and there doesn’t seem to be a good reason to have it in the first place. In fact, our measurements demand it not be there.
Let us think about this fact from a different perspective: there is no medium for those “Good Vibrations”. Nothing permeates the space between each other besides the molecules suspended in the air between us. And that aural glow around you is not celestial; they’re just excited air molecules or bending light rays.
But the arguments for this (scientific) search is deeply rooted in ‘Western’ determinism, seeking to identify causal relationships between a mechanism and (currently unexplainable) phenomena. Why is this so? Is our desire to identify (causal) relationships between theory and measurables simply driving another (super-string theory) deterministic explanation of our universe? Or are we really resolving and uncovering the mysteries of the universe?
This can be contrasted with the eastern idea of “Akasha”, which in Vendantic Hinduism refers to the ‘first’ element created. Akash literally means “sky” or “heavens”, and in this tradition, is the “basis” and “essence” of all things in the material world: it is the ‘first’ element ‘created’ (thereafter is air, fire/energy, water, and earth). The Buddhist interpretation is that Akasha is divided into limited (discrete) and endless (infinite) space.
Returning to the Hero’s journey, after the Michelson and Morley experiment, our description of the physical universe no longer requires any concept of ether… or does it? An uncomfortable outcome of Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle is that the universe can do funny things over very short time intervals. Dirac certainly had some ‘strange’ ideas on this and even suggested a) particles not being point-like to justify the propagation of superluminal interactions and b) a revived concept of ether where vacuum itself consists of a mixture of positive and negative stuff. In short, he proposes that chaotic randomly moving particles could exist with some strong caveats like covariance, rendering it undetectable via the M/M experiment. This generalizes into this ‘stochastic’ interpretation of quantum mechanics: the probabilistic nature of QM is not a limit of knowledge as suggested by Einstein but a natural consequence of chaotic aether. Moreover, the EPR paradox and other QM observations could be explained by this interpretation! Is this transformation? Atonement?
To make matters worse, the Super(symmetric) string theory is proposed to connect all the fundamental forces of nature into a single theory. The fundamental constituents of matter are Planck-length strings that vibrate at resonant frequencies. And so now, we must ask, “What is it that is vibrating in the first place”? Are we now in “Retum” of the Hero’s Journey? Is the Call to Adventure now the experimental verification of string theory?
This all begs several questions.
1. As noted earlier, from a Western perspective, are we going down the determinism rabbit hole if we believe in the existence of ether?
2. Is this affinity to aether a construct of humankind?
3. Is it ‘unreasonable’ to say, “sending good vibrations”?
4. Is this ether responsible for common interpretations of this touchy-feely ‘connectedness’ that some people feel is true?
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