Hello,
what we already know is, that idea of aether of Aristotle imagined it is of course nonsense. It was a nice idea about what space might be when he imagined it to be like a liquid in which things swim. I understand his thoughts... somehow... because it is at first sight really magical how things once we throw them or shot them can travel threw space without just falling to the ground like a heavy stone. So I have great sympathy for Aristotle and his idea. The questions he was asking at his time... the creativity in his explanations... there is something which I really love: Aristotle once stated by thinking about how live develops and how mice come into being that mice consist of bacon and rag. This is just a wonderful story. Today we are smiling about it. But I guess he was really serious when stating this.
It is an essential question to ask what it is that makes things travel through space like that.
One solution was the idea that an object travels through a medium. It is this idea which helped develope terms like inertia and buoyancy. Still today all those terms are in one or another way indeed connected to the aether. Funny if you think about it, isn't it?
Newton was the first to realize that it is not a medium causing those trajectories but rather a force, or let's better say: The property overcoming this force.
Today there is no doubt that an aether filled with substance does not exist. And so we replaced it by the term vacuum. Experiments trying to prove aether failed. No term romping about aether (like inertia or buoyancy) was able to tell us more about it then what aether is not. And yet all terms are a result of this nothingness, this ghost we are hunting.
Now... If all those experiments show us that there is no aether and indeed there is no aether, then any experiment trying to prove aether (null hypothesis) will show no results at all or experiments which prove an aether will later on turn out to be wrong, right?
If you think about it: When Einstein is stating now that it is space which bends isn't he in fact stating that it is aether which bends? And isn't he stating than it is the nothingness which bends?
It seem to be a contradiction that Einstein revives aether for the sake of mathematical fit by simply copying from Lorentz (and I guess we all know that Lorentz dealed with the idea of aether). I am not saying that Einstein's work is not able to produce postulations and statements and somehow seems to work. But I am saying that there is a fundamental failure in thinking. And if this is true there must be an explanation with a better fit then what Einstein produced coming up with a deeper truth then trying to tell us it is nothingness which bends, right?
What do you think? Maybe Einstein's work is just a piece of bacon hurled into a piece of rag?!
The concept of space is hard to grasp. Fortunately, the essence of GR may be formulated without diving to deep into this concept. Indeed, the contribution of GR is to deliver the motional effects of the static Newton gravitational law. These effects are included in electrodynamics and named magnetic and inductive effects referring to charges in uniform and accelerated motion respectively. Since these effects are due to the fact that interactions take time, mediated at the speed of light, equivalent effects appear in GR as in Electrodynamics. There is a beautiful formula in Einstein's book 'The meaning of relativity' where GR, in its linearized form, is formulated as a vector formula for force (mass times acceleration) in full equivalence with that of electrodynamics (formula (118) ). Unfortunately, Electrodynamics is conventionally formulated in terms of fields which hides this excellent and illuminating equivalence, which really is fundamental for science. If you are interested, I have formulated a new electrodynamics in terms of force in my book
Electrodynamics - the field free approach (Springer 2015)
in order to make it easier to see the equivalence between the motional effects in the two interactions.
So GR need not be interpreted as curved space-time, it is simply this. Non-linear effects which appear in GR general equation, I presume one mimics by considering retarded interactions of the linear formula (118) when solving it numerically.
So my answer to your original question is: NO, absolutely no
What concerns classical physics, most of it is contained in Einstein's book. So important is GR.
Thank you for your answer, Kjell. As far as I can say the late 19th and early 20th century have been the time when categorization in science somehow stopped and scientists rather tried out something new which was a property-based thinking. As far as I can say this was also the case in physics. While Maxwell was still working with a particle and it's wave Einstein took certain properties from particles and attached it to the space. The result is that the phenomenological object as it appears in the mind is now taken as the real object and we cannot differ anymore between the thing in itself, the object as it appears. Furthermore this makes it impossible to explain certain phenomenons like they appear in quantum physics and created a lot of confusion.
There is a huge difference between mathematics, logic and ratio. Logic tests statements and how they fit each other. Mathematics helps to test and reveal underlaying structures which cannot be seen since our senses are restricted. But rationality is the base for everything because it makes everything sound consistent.
We can create different models which are consistent, meaning that they sound 'good' and rational to us. They make sense. For example we can take properties of particles that change and say it is space which makes them change. And then we can even take certain properties and reduce materia and say particles transform because we have seen how water becomes steam and transforms into something else. We can make it all sound good and rational and logic helps us to fit all our statements into the knowledge we already gained about the world. And then we take math and apply it to the new statements and the knowldged we already have and underline our statements until it is all baked to a theory.
And then we state whenever there is a question questioning the fit of the model: "No, it cannot be wrong, because we have books about it. It is already knowledge. It is secured knowledge. It works."
This does not convince me at all.
Is there nothing you personally doubt? Anything you ever said that it somehow seems to sound good and yet you have a bad feeling about it? I must say I am for example hard doubting the correctness of 'the space is bending' because this seems to be more a comfortable view then a real one. I am also doubting terms like 'charge' or views like 'mass is increasing'. It all might sound consistent. And yet there seems to be some madness and misconception in it.
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