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The results of various experiments, including the Michelson–Morley experiment in 1887 (subsequently verified with more accurate and innovative experiments), led to the theory of special relativity, by showing that the aether did not exist. [20] Einstein's solution was to discard the notion of an aether and the absolute state of rest.
As historians such as John Stachel argue, Einstein's views on the "new aether" are not in conflict with his abandonment of the aether in 1905. As Einstein himself pointed out, no "substance" and no state of motion can be attributed to that new aether. [10] Einstein's use of the word "aether" found little support in the scientific community, and ...
Given the difficulty of constructing explicit small families of solutions, much less presenting something like a "general" solution to the Einstein field equation, or even a "general" solution to the vacuum field equation, a very reasonable approach is to try to find qualitative properties which hold for all solutions, or at least for all ...
An aether theorist would have regarded "...nor according to Maxwell's equations" as simply representing a misunderstanding on Einstein's part. Unfettered by any notion that the speed of light represents a cosmic limit, the aether theorist would simply have set velocity equal to c , noted that yes indeed, the light would appear to be frozen, and ...
Einstein's paper includes a fundamental description of the kinematics of the rigid body, and it did not require an absolutely stationary space, such as the aether. Einstein identified two fundamental principles, the principle of relativity and the principle of the constancy of light (light principle), which served as the axiomatic basis of his ...
A 1933 portrait of E. T. Whittaker by Arthur Trevor Haddon. The book was originally written in the period immediately following the publication of Einstein's Annus Mirabilis papers and several years following the early work of Max Planck; it was a transitional period for physics, where special relativity and old quantum theory were gaining traction.
The two-postulate basis for special relativity is the one historically used by Einstein, and it is sometimes the starting point today. As Einstein himself later acknowledged, the derivation of the Lorentz transformation tacitly makes use of some additional assumptions, including spatial homogeneity, isotropy, and memorylessness. [3]
And referring to the Fizeau experiment, he even wrote: "The aether is all but in our grasp." He also said the aether is necessary to harmonize Lorentz's theory with Newton's third law. Even in 1912 in a paper called "The Quantum Theory", Poincaré ten times used the word "aether", and described light as "luminous vibrations of the aether". [A 19]