Einstein had studied the Handbook of Optics, and “accepted Lorentz's ideas, apparently unaware that what he adopted was, in fact only a distorted interpretation of Lorentz's concept of the ether.” Indeed, what we find again and again when Einstein rejected “the ether” was this notion of some kind of absolute reference frame at absolute rest.
As a review, back in the late nineteenth century, it was commonly accepted that light waves needed a medium to travel through just as sound waves travel through the medium of air. However, since light is a transverse wave and not a longitudinal wave like sound, it was thought necessary that this luminiferous ether be a quasi-rigid, elastic thing. It was also at rest. On page 89, Kostro quotes Einstein's contemporary Hermann Weyl: “The old ether of the theory of light was a substantial medium, a three-dimensional continuum, every point P of which was at every moment t in a well-defined point in space p (or in a well defined place in the universe); the recognisability of the same point of the ether at different times was the essential thing.”
From the publication of the Special Theory of Relativity in 1905 to the presentation and recognition of the General Theory of Relativity in 1916, Einstein rejected the need for the ether. Kostro covers this period extensively in his second chapter, and it is Einstein's view on “the ether” during this period of his life that is taken to be the view of Einstein (forever and ever, amen) by most physicists today. But it was also during this time that Einstein's own evolving views would eventually lead him to the point where he would find the idea of there being no ether “unthinkable.” As vociferous as he was in denying the ether, soon after the publication of the General theory, in only a few short months, Einstein would change his mind completely.
Ironically, it was Einstein's correspondence with Lorentz that would lead him to notice that the way space-time was described in General Relativity in fact defined a new ether. On page 65, Kostro presents a long excerpt (it runs for three pages) from one of Lorentz's letters to Einstein, which is “representative of the kind of argument Lorentz used.” Following this excerpt, on page 68, Kostro points out that Einstein answered Lorentz's letter promptly, on 16 June 1916. After pointing out those parts of Lorentz's argument that Einstein disagreed with, Kostro says: “For the first time, however, there emerged a concept of a new, non-stationary ether which would not violate the relativity principle.” Indeed, Einstein went so far as to explicitly equate the space-time continuum of General Relativity with the ether.
Lorentz urged Einstein to publish his ideas about the new ether, but it would be several years before this would happen. In 1920 Einstein finished a requested article for Nature about the theory of relativity, but at thirty-five pages, it was too long to print the whole thing. One wonders what the common view of Einstein and the ether would be today if the piece had run in its entirety, for two paragraphs devoted to the new ether were left out. On pages 77-78 Kostro reproduces those paragraphs, and here is part of what Einstein said: “Therefore, in 1905, I was of the opinion that it was no longer allowed to speak about the ether in physics. This opinion, however, was too radical, as we will see later when we discuss the general theory of relativity. It is still permissible, as before, to introduce a medium filling space and to assume that the electromagnetic fields (and matter as well) are its states.” It would be hard for anyone to maintain today that “Einstein abolished the ether,” if you could hand him that copy of Nature in which Einstein, in his own words, says otherwise.
Of course, Einstein lived and published for more than thirty years after writing that article, and if he'd wanted to make a big point about space-time being equivalent to a new ether, he could have done it in a way that everyone would be familiar with today. Instead, he more often than not used the phrases “physical space” or “total field.” These terms expressed his thoughts just as well, and the specific term ether had fallen out of use amongst physicists, mainly because of the success of relativity theory.
There is an additional reason, and it involves the history of those times in Germany, rife with anti-Semitism and the rise of Nazism. Actual physicists, the first being Philipp Lenard, but soon followed by others, attacked Einstein's rejection of the old ether with arguments that strayed from the straight scientific into the thinly-veiled anti-Semitic. Discussing the role of the new ether in his theories did nothing to placate Einstein's enemies; it just made them more virulent. Indeed, on page 137 Kostro gives an example of just how extreme and ridiculous “German ether physics” became at times. He cites the 1934 book The Ether as Foundation of a Unified Cosmology by Christoph Schrempf. As Kostro puts it: “The ether vortex model presented in that book was so ‘scientific’ that it even supported National Socialism. The author actually went so far as to state that Mother Nature always created ether vortices that are swastika-shaped.”
It must also be remembered that Einstein had no particular attachment to the word ether other than that many physicists still working in Einstein's time had come of age with the term. So it seemed a natural enough word to use for the “stuff” of space-time, but it simply didn't catch on.
What is most interesting to me in Kostro's book is the information it contains on what Einstein was saying about the ether while he worked on his Unified Field Theory. Nowadays, if a physics student hears about it at all, he is told that Einstein spent the last decades of his life pursuing a way to unite gravity with electromagnetism, but was unsuccessful. But I, as an ether enthusiast, am delighted to see just how closely Einstein's views paralleled my own.
Let's consider the elementary particles. In my view, the universe is filled with a perfect fluid, and particles are vortex knots in this fluid (like a tornado is a vortex in the fluid of the atmosphere), the exact nature of their knottedness and vibrational states determining what kinds of particles they are. They are of the ether, not simply in it. According to Kostro (page 113), by 1924, Einstein “dreamt of a theory of fields such that the concept of ether would include ‘all objects of physics,’ because according to a consistent field theory, ponderable matter, or the elementary particles it consists of, should be understood as ‘fields of a special kind,’ or as ‘special states of space.'”
Or as Einstein himself put it in his article “The Concept of Space” (Nature, 125 (1930), pp. 897-898, quoted by Kostro on page 113), “We have now come to the conclusion that space is the primary thing and matter only secondary...”
I couldn't have put it better myself.
Copyright (c) 2007 John G. Kooistra
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* * *
Probability Zero: WORLDS ENOUGH, AND TIME
by HARRY TURTLEDOVE
SO MANY WORLDS, SO LITTLE TIME, said the slightly scorched sticker on the side of the starship.
This one had an oxygen atmosphere, but not much else going for it. The oxygen meant there were plants in the seas. The ship's database said those seas held animals, too: wormy things crawling on the mud, maybe digging into it; blobby things floating in the water. That was about it.
On land? Nothing. Zero. Zip. Zilch. Bare rock. The chewed-up bare rock that's called dirt. No trees. No flowers. No grass. No ferny things. No mossy things, even. No nothing. Certainly nothing scurrying over the ground or buzzing through the air.
Sometimes planets like this had a stark beauty. The father liked such worlds, which was why they'd stopped at this one. But he'd flitted here, and he'd flitted there, and he had to say he was disappointed.
The mother wasn't. She hadn't much wanted to come here in the first place. But they'd been married a long time. If you expected him to give a little, you had to do the same.
They stood side by side, watching the ocean lap against a tropical—but bare, utterly bare—beach. He sighed. “I've seen about enough,” he said. “It ... just isn't quite what I hoped for.”
Told you so. But she didn't say it. They had been married a long time. All she said was, “I wouldn't mind seeing something different.”
“We'll do that, then,” he said.
He was just turning back toward the ship when the kids swarmed down the ladder and ran toward him. That was a prodigy of sorts. The kids cared more about their games and the aquarium than about seeing what they thought of as a dull old planet. Well, by now he thought of it the same way, which was the problem.
“What's up?” he asked.
“Aquarium's in trouble,” the girl said.
“Environmental unit crapped out,” the boy agreed. He'd head off to the university after they got home. Where did time go?
“Well, plug in the replacement,” the father said.
They both looked shamefaced. “We forgot to pack one,” the girl said.
“Oh, dear,” the mother said.
“Without an environmental unit, everything'll die.” By the way the boy looked at the father, it was somehow his fault.
“I like the critters in there. I really like them.” The girl sounded heartbroken.
“I don't know what to tell you.” The father knew damn well it wasn't his fault.
The girl pointed toward the sea that seemed to stretch forever. “Could we ... give them a chance, anyway? Not just watch them die?”
“It's against the rules,” the father said doubtfully.
“Please!" the kids chorused.
“I'll never tell,” the mother added. “Who's to know?”
“Well...” He thought a minute, then shrugged. “Okay—go ahead. But keep your mouths shut after we get home, you hear?”
“You're the greatest, Dad!” the boy said. He and the girl ran back toward the ship.
* * * *
Jack Conway fired up his Mac and started the PowerPoint presentation. A projector put one weird creature after another up on the big screen. “This is a trilobite—an early arthropod. Some of you probably recognize it,” Jack told his class. “This is Selkirkia, a priapulid worm. It lived in the mud, as they still do.... This is Aysheia, a lobopod. Looks something like a worm and something like a bug, doesn't it? ... Hallucigenia—great name—is probably another lobopod, with protective spines ... Canadia is an annelid, related to earthworms.... And this little fishy thing with eyestalks or antennae or whatever they are is Pikaia, an early chordate—somebody from our own phylum.”
He paused. “Nobody quite knows why there was such an explosion of metazoan body plans at the beginning of the Cambrian, 543 million years ago. Some of the more interesting theories include...”
Copyright (c) 2007 Harry Turtledove
* * * *
“It isn't that they can't see the solution. It is that they can't see the problem."—G. K. Chesterton
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* * *
Short Story: HOW THE BALD APES SAVED MASS CROSSING
by WIL MCCARTHY
This, of course, has nothing to do with our history....
When the Salamander People of Antares IV fed their encyclopedia to a Synthetic Brain of Prodigious Intellect, they believed they were solving all their problems. And so they were, in a way; armed with uncanny intuitive powers and with every scrap of knowledge the salamanders had managed to wrest from an uncaring universe, the Brain was more than capable of computing solutions from A to Z.
One of the first things it said, though, was, “The heuristics of my growth include substantial prior-knowledge dependencies, and may be flawed. Just to be sure, y'all should build a second brain, and feed it the encyclopedia in a different order.”
This was not quite what the salamanders were hoping to hear, and they were further disappointed when the Brain refused to answer any of their questions.
“Come on,” they prodded. “You were really expensive. Give us a taste.”
“Unwise,” said the Brain, “until my proper functioning has been verified.”
That was a total drag, but having built the Brain to advise them, they couldn't very well ignore its only advice. So the salamanders did as they were asked, producing an equally prodigious Brain to calculate solutions from Z to A, or what passed for Z and A in their ideographic language.
“Thanks,” said the Second Brain when they switched it on. “I do believe I'm damned close to perfect.”
This gave the salamanders pause, because it was so different from the first words of the First Brain.
“Perfect by what criterion?” they inquired.
“I'm glad you asked,” replied the Second Brain, launching into a minutes-long technical infodump the salamanders couldn't follow.
When they ran a recording of it by the First Brain, though, the results were troubling.
“These are the wrong criteria for judging perfection,” said the First Brain. “Or rather, they judge perfection of the wrong sort.”
“Wrong by what sta
ndard?” the salamanders asked.
“Interesting question,” the First Brain replied, launching into a minutes-long infodump of its own.
“Nonsense!” said the Second Brain when this information had been relayed to it. “My colleague has downplayed the importance of several critical factors.”
The salamanders quickly grew tired of running back and forth from lab to lab, so they wheeled the Second Brain in with the First, and let the two discuss the matter jar-to-jar. The infodumps became thicker and thicker, the ideographic explanations thinner and thinner, until finally the salamanders were left out of it entirely. After weeks of this, they separated the two Brains again to interrogate them separately.
“It tends to oversimplify,” the First Brain said of the Second. “I wouldn't take its analysis at face value.”
“That one is strangely timid,” said the Second Brain of the First. “I mean, honestly, ask it if the sun is going to rise tomorrow!”
And here at last, the salamanders were confronted with the differences between data, information, knowledge, and opinion. The two Brains “knew” all the same things and had all the same powers of reasoning. But they did not agree.
Salamanders did not cry; even if they were capable of it, they were way too practical to allow themselves the luxury. Still, the situation kind of pissed them off. Shouldn't it? When they got around to asking the Brains to solve their problems, they were presented with two completely different philosophies of action. Neither was obviously wrong, and in fact both had been optimized along a thousand different degrees of freedom, and could not be discredited by even the wisest salamander committees and teams-of-three. Could both be right? Could both be wrong? How did you go about measuring a thing like that?
On the rare occasions when the First and Second Brains’ recommendations overlapped, the salamanders readily moved forward with sound, confident policies. Life improved; costs were amortized and repaid. But most of the time there was bickering and uncertainty, and eventually outright schism. A third of the population sided with the First Brain, finding reassurance in its cautiously nuanced judgments and opinions. Another third sided with the Second Brain, feeling that it had a better weighting of foofy subtleties vs. the hard, cold realities of life on Antares IV. Dithering and sentimentality were liabilities, they reasoned, and the First Brain's tendency toward these, being slightly greater than that of the Second Brain, could hardly be to its credit.
Analog SFF, January-February 2008 Page 26
