"Can we represent the electric field by something more like a temperature, say like the displacement of a piece of jello? Suppose that we were to begin by imagining that the world was filled with thin jello and that the fields represented some distortion—say a stretching or twisting—of the jello. Then we could visualize the field. After we “see” what it is like we could abstract the jello away. For many years that’s what people tried to do. Maxwell, Ampère, Faraday, and others tried to understand electromagnetism this way. (Sometimes they called the abstract jello “ether.”) But it turned out that the attempt to imagine the electromagnetic field in that way was really standing in the way of progress. We are unfortunately limited to abstractions, to using instruments to detect the field, to using mathematical symbols to describe the field, etc. But nevertheless, in some sense the fields are real, because after we are all finished fiddling around with mathematical equations—with or without making pictures and drawings or trying to visualize the thing—we can still make the instruments detect the signals from Mariner II and find out about galaxies a billion miles away, and so on."
Quote Details
Added by wikiquote-import-bot
Unverified quote
0 likes
Original Language: English
Available Languages (1)
Sources
Revision History
No revisions have been submitted for this quote.
Categories
Luminiferous aether
47 quotes on TrueQuotesView all quotes by Luminiferous aether →
Related Quotes
"Ether theories after the middle of the nineteenth century tended to posit that matter was not, in fact, material at a…"
"The spooky ether was persistent. It took an Einstein to remove it from the Universe. ...Gradually, over the last twen…"
"The physicist's concept of nothing—the vacuum... began as empty space—the void... turned into a stagnant ether throug…"
"The difficult surface conditions met with when light passes from one medium to another, including such subjects as el…"
"I hold in fact (1) That small portions of space are in fact of a nature analogous to little hills on a surface which …"
"Einstein's definition... does not differ in spirit from the definitions in classical science; its sole advantage is t…"
"These last two equations connote that varying electric and magnetic intensities will be propagated through the ether …"
"The most precise experiments have proved the correctness of the Einsteinian laws of mechanics and...Bucherer's experi…"
"We may assume the existence of an aether; only we must give up ascribing a definite state of motion to it, i.e. we mu…"
"Under the influence of the elastic forces, the electrons can vibrate about their positions of equilibrium. In doing s…"