Carl Sagan once said: “Even today, the most jaded city dweller can be unexpectedly moved upon encountering a clear night sky studded with thousands of twinkling stars. When it happens to me after all these years it still takes my breath away.” The quest to comprehend these glimmering specks can consume a lifetime, efforts sometimes rewarded by the joy of enduring discovery. Thanks to these efforts, we can determine a star’s age, mass, composition and many other properties. However, most people are unaware that our greatest physicists have yet to agree how star light crosses the so-called void of empty space as it falls upon our powerful telescopes. If an inspired scientist claims to understand one aspect of the puzzle, another scientist proposes yet another theory that surfaces ever more complex problems. Thousands of theories have been proposed since the days of Einstein, and none of them comprehensively unifies everything we know. So why can’t we answer such an important question about the way our Universe works?
Light travels at a measured speed which seems fast because it takes just a little over a second to reach the Earth from the Moon. In contrast, it takes 13.4 billion years for light to arrive from GN-z11, the most distant galaxy known. It has long been suspected that something has to exist to slow the passage of light otherwise it would travel infinitely fast arriving at its destination everywhere in the Universe instantaneously. We know this doesn’t happen, so what exactly causes light to slow to “the speed of light”?
We now know that our Universe contains only a small amount of ordinary mass, stars and planets etc. Fortunately for Einstein, his famous aether-less theory of relativity doesn’t require empty space to contain anything. But something is there. It’s now widely believed that the Universe contains 5 percent ordinary matter, the other 95 percent is filled with something, but we’re not quite sure what that is. To fully explain the nature of light and extend what we know, we need a new theory, one that could come from an old idea.
Until the early 1900s, scientists working to answer these questions made remarkable progress by establishing theories using the concept of something called “the aether”, an obscure medium that was responsible for transmitting light, conceptually the same as air being the medium for carrying sound waves and water being the medium that carries water waves. Using these new (at the time) theories, the so-called luminiferous aether was believed to carry light waves. However, the aether was somewhat different because, unlike air or water, it cannot be easily manipulated (you can blow air and pour water).
From a historical perspective, Galileo first realized the Principle of Relativity around 1632, Maxwell described electromagnetism conceptually and mathematically in 1865, Fitzegerald recognized Length Contraction in 1889, Lorentz proposed the concept of Variation of Mass in 1892, Larmor added Time Dilation in 1897, and Poincaré conceived the Constancy of the Velocity of Light in 1898. During this time, each subsequent electromagnetic theory was built on the other using the concept of an aether. With the exception of Maxwell, Einstein is usually credited with most of these ideas because he claimed he never studied his forefather’s work. Whether or not this is the case, the fact remains that Einstein was not the first to conceive of these ideas. In fact, when it comes to relativity, Einstein’s most celebrated unique idea was to join space (three dimensions) and time (one dimension) into a single four-dimensional thought experiment, the so-called space-time continuum which was described mathematically by Herman Minkowski in 1907, and is now known as Minkowski space.
Albert Einstein’s celebrated 1906 Special Relativity theory convincingly excluded the aether in order to account for the unexpected negative result of the now famous Michelson and Morley experiment which was intended to detect it. An intense debate lasting several decades ensued, no theory presented was in complete agreement with the other nor provided all the answers, but in the end Einstein’s aether-less theory was considered the least problematic. Although the concept of an aether was rejected by Einstein and is no longer accepted by mainstream science, it was assigned fundamental characteristics (permittivity and permeability) by James Maxwell in 1865 whose famous equations still define the properties of the aether as originally intended, contradicting Einstein by recognizing the ability of electromagnetic waves to “bounce” within something that is no longer considered to exist. However, these measured properties of the aether still form the basis of all modern wireless technologies.
As we fast forward to today, we find that Dark Energy and Higgs Field theories are gaining acceptance based on the notion that vacuum space has structure. A growing number of scientists are beginning to reconsider Einstein’s aether-less interpretation, even predicting new possibilities such as intergalactic space travel. Former NASA and Stanford University scientist, Professor Selwyn Wright is one of those scientists who have written extensively about the universal reference field; that it is attracted to the Earth and other gravitational bodies, greatly simplifying our fundamental understanding of the physical Universe. Wright believes that whenever you hear a news headline that another pillar of Einstein’s relativity has been verified, it’s usually confirming earlier predictions made by Maxwell, Lorentz and others. Using the concept of a compressible universal reference field it doesn’t take a stretch of the imagination to realize that gravity waves are merely ripples made by the sudden decompression of the reference field by the annihilation of gravitational matter into energy and precipitation of energy back into matter when two black holes collide and coalesce, LIGO (2016).
Wright’s theory, New Relativity (NR), takes Einstein’s aether based aspects of relativity to the next level; solving many more complex problems in physics, proposing new experiments, providing solutions to obstacles that once impeded previous aether theories that could lead to a unification theory of the Universe.