Genesis of the Query “Is There an Ether?”
von Herbert E. Ives
Genesis of the Query “Is There an Ether?”
Herbert E. Ives
New Jersey, March 1953
The recent communication by P.A.M. Dirac under the title „Is there an ether?“1 may be taken as occasion to review the origin of the widely publicized and now almost “orthodox” view that there is no ether.
The denial of a medium for transmitting electromagnetic signals with a velocity independent of their material source was not, as is sometimes represented, a conclusion
drawn from the Michelson-Morley experiment, which failed to detect relative motion between matter and ether. The existence of the ether was not questioned by Michelson; in reporting his results, he considered them as giving support to the idea of an ether entrained by the earth in its motion. In the proposals of Fitzgerald, Lorentz, and Larmor for the explanation of the null result of Michelson-Morley experiment there is no suggestion of the nonexistence of the ether. The contractions of dimensions and clock rates associated with their names were suggested behaviors of matter in motion with respect to the ether, in conformity with which the Michelson-Morley experiment would not reveal the motion.
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Siehe auch vom Autor in diesem Blog:
The Einstein Myth and the Ives Papers: A Counter-Revolution in Physics
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- 28. September 2013
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