Light and the Ether

Einstein's Theories of Relativity and Gravitation by Albert Einstein, is part of the HackerNoon Books Series. You can jump to any chapter in this book here. Light and the Ether

Light and the Ether

It is among the possibilities that the wave theory of light itself will in the end be more or less seriously modified. It is even more definitely among the possibilities that the ether will be discarded.]* [Certainly when Lord Kelvin estimates that its mass per cubic centimeter is .000,000,000,000,000,001 gram, while Sir Oliver Lodge insists that the correct figure is 1,000,000,000,000,000 grams, it is quite evident that we know so little about it that it is better to get along without it if we can.]216 [But to avoid confusion we must emphasize that Einstein makes no mention whatsoever of the ether; his theory is absolutely independent of any theory of the ether.]139 [Save as he forbids us to employ the ether as a standard of absolute motion, Einstein does not in the least care what qualities we assign to it, or whether we retain it at all. His demands are going to be made upon light itself, not upon the alleged medium of light transmission.

When two observers in relative motion to one another measure their velocities with respect to a third material object, they expect to get different results. Their velocities with regard to this object properly differ, for it is no more to be taken as a universal super-observer than either of them. But if they get different results when they come to measure the velocity with which light passes their respective [79]systems, relativity is challenged. Light is with some propriety to be regarded as a universal observer; and if it will measure our velocities against each other we cannot deny it rank as an absolute standard. If we are not prepared to abandon universal relativity, and adopt one of the “fluke” explanations for the Michelson-Morley result, we must boldly postulate that in free space light presents the same velocity C to all observers—whatever the source of the light, whatever the relative motion between source and observer, whatever the relative motion between the several observers. The departure here from the old assumption lies in the circumstance that the old physics with its ether assigned to light a velocity universally constant in this ether; we have stopped talking about the medium and have made the constant C refer to the observer’s measured value of the velocity of light with regard to himself.

We are fortified in this assumption by the Michelson-Morley result and by all other observations bearing directly upon the matter. Nevertheless, as Mr. Francis says in his essay, we feel instinctively that space and time are not so constituted as to make it possible, if I pass you at 100 miles per hour, for the same light-impulse to pass us both at the same speed C.]* [The implicit assumptions underlying this feeling, be they true or false, are now so interwoven with the commonly received notions of space and time that any theory which questions them has all the appearance of a fantastic and unthinkable thing.]115 [We cannot, however, go back on our relativity; so when]* [Einstein shows us that an [80]entirely new set of time and space concepts is necessary to reconcile universe relativity with this fundamental fact of the absolute constancy of the observed velocity of light in vacuo,]18 [all that is left for us to do is to inquire what revisions are necessary, and submit to them.]*

[The conceptual difficulties of the theory arise principally from attributing to space and time the properties of things. No portion of space can be compared with another, save by convention; it is things which we compare. No interval of time can be compared with another, save by convention. The first has gone when the second becomes “now”.]149 [It is events that we compare, through the intervention of things. Our measurements are never of space or of time, but only of the things and the events that occupy space and time. And since the measurements which we deal with as though they were of space and of time lie at the foundation of all physical science, while at the same time themselves constituting, as we have seen, the only reality of which we are entitled to speak, it is in order to examine with the utmost care the assumptions underlying them. That there are such assumptions is clear—the very possibility of making measurements is itself an assumption, and every technique for carrying them out rests on an assumption. Let us inquire which of these it is that relativity asks us to revise.]*

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