Page:Eddington A. Space Time and Gravitation. 1920.djvu/55

II] world. Nevertheless, it would almost seem that such motion must logically exist, if the aether exists; and, even at the expense of formal simplicity, it ought to be exhibited in any theory which pretends to give a complete account of what is going on in nature. If a substantial aether analogous to a material ocean exists, it must rigidify, as it were, a definite space; and whether the observer or whether nature pays any attention to that space or not, a fundamental separation of space and time must be there. Some would cut the knot by denying the aether altogether. We do not consider that desirable, or, so far as we can see, possible; but we do deny that the aether need have such properties as to separate space and time in the way supposed. It seems an abuse of language to speak of a division existing, when nothing has ever been found to pay any attention to the division.

Mathematicians of the nineteenth century devoted much time to theories of elastic solid and other material aethers. Waves of light were supposed to be actual oscillations of this substance; it was thought to have the familiar properties of rigidity and density; it was sometimes even assigned a place in the table of the elements. The real death-blow to this materialistic conception of the aether was given when attempts were made to explain matter as some state in the aether. For if matter is vortex-motion or beknottedness in aether, the aether cannot be matter—some state in itself. If any property of matter comes to be regarded as a thing to be explained by a theory of its structure, clearly that property need not be attributed to the aether. If physics evolves a theory of matter which explains some property, it stultifies itself when it postulates that the same property exists unexplained in the primitive basis of matter.

Moreover the aether has ceased to take any very active part in physical theory and has, as it were, gone into reserve. A modern writer on electromagnetic theory will generally start with the postulate of an aether pervading all space; he will then explain that at any point in it there is an electromagnetic vector whose intensity can be measured; henceforth his sole dealings are with this vector, and probably nothing more will be heard of the aether itself. In a vague way it is supposed that this vector represents some condition of the aether, and we need not