Aether Science Papers: Part I: The Creative Vacuum
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Copyright © 1996 Harold Aspden
ABOUT THE TITLE
The 'aether' is a word which says that there is no such thing as empty space. To say there is no aether is therefore to assert that space can be truly empty, meaning it contains nothing of an electrical character, it now being a well established fact that there is nothing having a physical existence that lacks electrical properties. If a scientist expresses doubt by reference to the 'neutron', I say that the neutron has magnetic properties which are seated in the motion of electric charge. Otherwise, you need to explain why it has a magnetic moment. If that scientist then mentions the 'neutrino', then I say that the 'neutrino' was only a notion, a figment of imagination invented as a devious way of declaring that the aether could absorb or shed energy and momentum without admitting that the aether exists. If that scientist says that the consensus opinion of professors of physics who deny the reality of the aether can surely not be discarded, then I ask "Why not?" and can but point to a report on page 12, 6 May 1996 issue, of The Times newspaper in U.K.
Science correspondent Nigel Hawkes wrote under a heading 'The possibility of getting something for nothing':
"A physicist at Cambridge University has produced a new and daring explanation for an old puzzle. If she is right, it could be the first convincing evidence that it is possible to get something from nothing. The question Claudia Eberlein addresses in a forthcoming issue of Physical Review Letters is that of sonoluminescence. If you expose water to a blast of ultrasound, you get a flash of light. This is deeply puzzling, because visible light has so much more energy than sound that the energy of the sound has somehow to be boosted by a trillionfold. The wavelength of the light emitted implies that the source is at a temperature of tens of thousands of degrees C. Ms Eberlein suggests that the emission of light is a quantum vacuum effect - energy given off by the vacuum. Quantum theory says that there is in reality no such thing as a vacuum and that empty space teems with 'virtual partices' including photons which flit in and out of existence. The theory is open to test. If it turns out to be right, her explanation will be a major coup, the first observable manifestation of quantum vacuum radiaton."
The energetic vacuum is, therefore, a live issue. The 'aether' is a reality and I believe that it can, like a fluid crystal, form structure and dissolve that structure, as it latches onto material substance, but if that substance vibrates excessively then even the aether is confounded and, in its confusion, it sheds energy! I have, accordingly, chosen the title Aether Science Papers with deliberation, knowing that, in the end, the 'aether', per se, will have to be recognized, even though that will confound the non-believers who constitute the modern generation of physicists.
