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In physics the Einstein-aether theory, also called aetheory, is the name coined in 2004 for a modification of general relativity that has a preferred reference frame and hence violates Lorentz invariance. These generally covariant theories describes a spacetime endowed with both a metric and a unit timelike vector field named the aether.
Hence light traveling against the flow of water should be slower than light traveling with the flow of water. The interference pattern between the two beams when the light is recombined at the observer depends upon the transit times over the two paths, and can be used to calculate the speed of light as a function of the speed of the water. [S 2]
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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.
In general relativity, a vacuum solution is a Lorentzian manifold whose Einstein tensor vanishes identically. According to the Einstein field equation , this means that the stress–energy tensor also vanishes identically, so that no matter or non-gravitational fields are present.
In general relativity, a lambdavacuum solution is an exact solution to the Einstein field equation in which the only term in the stress–energy tensor is a cosmological constant term. This can be interpreted physically as a kind of classical approximation to a nonzero vacuum energy .