The ideas of the Aetherists go back to the works of scholars of the late 17th century. It was then that Hooke and Huygens expressed their opinions in treatises on the wave nature of light.
Waves must propagate in some medium, and to fulfill the role of such a medium, a “luminiferous ether” was invented, a kind of miracle built of different charges (what is this charge?) And saturated with magnetism (what is this?).
Almost as many versions of the ether were invented as there were etherists who studied “electromagnetic waves”.
In 1865, J. Maxwell, transferring the formulas reflecting wave processes in material bodies into an imaginary “ether”, formalized the theory of the “electromagnetic field” mathematically. Hertz and Heaviside with their experiments seemed to recognize “electromagnetic waves” in “waves of light” and all contemporaries agreed with this, despite the fact that no electrical and magnetic phenomena were detected in the stream of light.
Since that time, there has been a “study” of “electric and magnetic fields” and “electromagnetic waves” and different variants of the structure of the “ether” in which they propagate, and in fact, the invention of different formulas about this. The graph that gives the etherists an idea of the form of “electromagnetic waves”, appearing everywhere, shows either a parallel increase in the “electric” and “magnetic” fields, then the zeroing of both of them! That is, the etherists imagine that these “fields”, which are unknown what, exist separately from the particles, appear simultaneously from nothing, then for some reason grow, and then decrease, turning into nothing …
Even if we imagine a mathematical model of such a fantastic environment as “ether”, in which millions of “electromagnetic waves” move through each pixel simultaneously in different directions, then no mathematical tricks can be used to separate the “electromagnetic oscillations” of any single oscillation from other similar oscillations.
Interference and diffraction of “electromagnetic waves” should, as it were, indicate their obvious “summation”, if we consider the dark places of the interference pattern as their mutual zeroing, and light places as addition with increasing amplitude … But there is no zeroing! After interference, real photons move independently and remain photons …
For a long time, various versions of the “ether” seemed to the aetherists as if they were composed of some kind of particles. At the beginning of the XX century, after the works of Michelson, Morley, Einstein, theoretical physicists basically abandoned attempts to describe the “ether” physically, but it was left as a set of formulas describing the “electromagnetic waves” of Maxwell and Hertz. That is, in reality, “ether” remained, it was simply veiled under the name “physical vacuum” and “curved space”. What are “electromagnetic waves” and different “fields”, as if with the help of which other, very different physical phenomena were studied, neither the aetherists nor the relativists have ever explained.
All this happened because the idea of a certain mysterious environment was easily combined with any mathematical formulas and was very necessary for theorists-cosmologists, because such a mysterious environment allowed them to invent anything in it. The “physical vacuum” was defined by theorists as the lowest energy state of matter, which has zero oscillations of quantized fields, and, in the absence of real particles, carries them in a “virtual” form. According to the inventions of theorists from physics, the properties of the physical vacuum can determine all the properties of all other states of matter, including the most “insane” ones, absolutely sucked from the finger, and all of them easily “arise” from the vacuum for theorists. The idea of a “physical vacuum” sanctioned complete arbitrariness in theoretical physics, allowing everything from the “puffing out” of the Higgs bosons by particles of matter and the possibility of creating “universes”, for example, in colliders, to the conclusion that: “The universe as a system is not only self-organized, but alive, and even reasonable due to the presence of an active element (vacuum) in it, capable of functioning in the mode peculiar to the Reason. “
Наука и лженаука.
