Dear Rob,
You said: "If there was ether, than all of the celestial bodies would simply be unmoving, and an equal distance from the body that they orbit."
I do not understand how you arrived at this notion. There is no way that ether can produce anti-gravity so as to keep non-moving massive bodies from colliding.
Actually dark matter may be close to the ancient concept of ether. Dark mater contains 90% of the mass of the universe yet has not been detected yet except for its influence on the motion of visible objects like stars.
Black holes are indirectly detected via the same kinds of observations, except that the star motions suggest a point-like massive body; whereas the star motions suggesting dark matter are due to a permeating galactic halo.
At least in one interpretation of quantum mechanics called Bohmian mechanics, dark matter may be the medium in which waves exist that guide particles. This is quite close to the ether concept in which ether is the medium of the vibration of EM waves.
Such interpretations go under the heading of wave/particle duality.
The interpretation made famous by Feymann is that only particles exist, not waves; but anti-particles coming back from the future were required. This is how he derived QED.
I formerly believed that only waves existed and that particles were just an instantaneous approximation of what happened to the waves during an interaction. This is consistent with the eastern concept of Maya: that what we see is illusion. However, there is no available theory for how the waves collapse down to Planck scales to interact with other kinds of particles.
There are variations on the above interpretation such as the Copenhagen Interpetation by Bohr who claimed that human concsiousness is required for collapse. Another variation is that incoherence provides for collapse. Even another is that collapse is spontaneous based on the massiveness of the collection of particles involved.
A third popular interpretation is that, rather than collapsing down to a single particle, each interaction results in every possible particle configuration, but each possibility belongs to a different universe- the so-called many universe theory.
The Bohm theory is the least popular, yet is the only one where waves and particles have real existence. In most the above interpretations the waves or eigenfunctions of the particles are virtual mathematical objects and not actually physically real.
It is not widely realized that waves can have real existence in the Bose-Einstein Condensate postulated to exist in dark matter as a coherent collection of extremely light but numerous particles having global wave functions.
The problems with this last interpretation is that the dark matter BEC is yet to be detected; and even given the existence of a BEC, it is not clear how the BEC guides matter particles like electrons. Yet in super conductors it is clear that the BEC medium guides electrons through the material without any friction. Somehow the electrons know how to avoid the atoms.
Anyway, that is my belief about what is essentially ether.
yanniru |