Part-I: The Rise of Ether - The seat of Absolute Time and Space

PART-I        

While reading a very intriguing book, “A Brief History of Time”, by one of the most accomplished physicists of our time, Stephen Hawking's I was amazed by the simplicity and very friendly explanations of many scientific topics by the author. Even in the first few pages, one would be forced to dive deeper into the topics, the author is describing. Such was Newton’s attempts to drag his understanding of absolute time and space as the universal truth, and the understanding of nature of light through Ether, all of which fall victim to a certain clerk in the Swiss patent office, Albert Einstein.

What do Absolute Time and Space even mean?

In the year 1687, Sir Isaac Newton introduced the world with his work Principia Mathematica, which laid the foundation of our current understanding of the universe. In that book, Newton gave us the terms Absolute Time, Absolute Space and Absolute Rest.

Newton argued that absolute space is an entity, which can be said to be a container in the universe, in which all the objects, or existence lie. It is a fixed immovable reference frame that exists independently of any object or motion. Consider it as a bigger picture of the universe, in which all the existence as we know is settled. Absolute rest, on the other hand is said to be an entity in the absolute space, which is at the ultimate rest, so that motion of any moving body, can be seen relative to it. Newton believed that if we were to accept absolute space as the universal truth, then absolute rest is a mere consequence of that, and hence the motion of any object should be easily determined relative to that, but such was not the case.

Since one can not observe the absolute space directly, it can be interpreted as if space has to be a finite world, floating into the nothingness of the cosmos, which has its boundaries, its limits, a specific point beyond which space should somehow cease to exist, then only can we say the space is absolute. But such is not the case, hence Newton argued that there is no absolute space, and hence no absolute rest because an object is always in motion relative to something. Even a person sleeping on their bed is not truly at rest from a cosmological perspective. Since their body exists on Earth, which is constantly moving around the Sun, they are indirectly in motion relative to the Sun.

Newton and Aristotle, one of the greatest minds, believed time to be absolute. They thought that time is an independent entity which is not affected by any laws of physics. Moreover, the time interval between two events can be easily determined, such was Newton’s say, but it all fade away into the face of speed of light.

Understanding the nature of Light

Before 1670s, it was a common belief that light is something so instantaneous, that it moves with an infinite speed, but in the year 1676, Danish astronomer Ole Christensen Roemer observed a series of unexplainable events, when he was studying the moons of the Jupiter. He observed that the light from the eclipse of the Jupiter’s moon, takes more time to reach earth (his observational instrument), when the Jupiter was farther away from the earth. To which he concluded that light must have a finite speed, otherwise no matter what the distance in between is, it should take the same time.

Later in the year 1865, the British physicist James Clerk Maxwell when succeeded in unifying electricity and magnetism, he postulated that light can be travelling in the form of a wave alike an electromagnetic wave. He predicted that light waves must travel at a fixed speed.

Now the dilemma rises, as, if we were to acknowledge the fact that light travels with a finite speed, there must be a sort of common ground, or simply a reference frame which must be incredibly at rest, something like the absolute rest. Meaning there must exist a point in space which is so much at rest, that from that point we can determine the speed of light. Since this point is not moving, and is incredibly stationary, it allows one to clearly observe how fast light is actually moving. That common ground or reference frame was said to be Ether.

We will explore more facts and knowledge in the upcoming PART-II of this article, in which we will learn more about Ether and how it was contradicted by Relativity. Thank you for reading the article up to this point. A huge thanks to Stephen Hawking's may he rest in peace. Without him and his book, this article would not be possible.

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