There was a time at the end of the nineteenth century and the start of the twentieth century when people – young and old just like today – were skeptical about everything they saw and everything they were told. The youngsters among them questioned the existence of Santa Claus whereas the older folks, some of them scientists, questioned the existence of an aether engulfing all of space.
In the firm
belief that science must accurately represent the laws of nature, giants in the
caliber of Maxwell, Michelson and Morley left no stone unturned trying to
resolve the question of the aether. While doing that, editors of newspapers,
delved into the question preoccupying their young readers at the time. They
worked on making the little ones see Santa Claus as a real entity who lives in
their heats as well as the hearts of all the good people that harbor “love,
generosity and devotion”.
This story
was told because 8-year old Virginia O’Hanlon wrote a letter to the editor of
the Sun, then a publication of New York City. She asked whether or not there
was a Santa Claus. And on September 21, 1897, editor Francis Church responded
with an editorial that, in turn, asked: “Is there a Santa Claus?” to which he
responded: “Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus”.
So, here we
are at the start of the twenty-first century, living in an era so similar to that
of Virginia O’Hanlon and Francis Church,
we wonder whether the situation is that of “the more things change, the more
they are the same?” Or is it that Francis Church was hit with a Santa Clause sort
of clairvoyance that made him see the future so accurately? We may never answer
these questions, and we may never pull today’s younger generation from its
skeptical habits, but we now have an answer to the question: Is there an
aether?
Here is that
answer: Were Virginia O’Hanlon and Francis Church alive today, they would most
likely have had conversations similar to what they had in the past … this time,
however, tailor-made to the demands of the modern era. And so, she would have
asked whether or not there was an aether, and he would have responded: Yes, Virginia,
there is an aether.
And he
would have gone on to explain that the aether engulfs the entire universe. In
fact, whether we call it Dark Energy or Dark Matter or something else, the
stuff we may think of as aether, is more prevalent throughout the universe than
anything else. Incidentally, mention of that “something else” refers to a
theory of the universe devised by yours truly. It is that of a placid lake filled
with self-duplicating particles that generate De Broglie matter-waves and other
combinations that still need to be identified.
One
combination that was identified and described with a mechanical model by James
Maxwell, is the electromagnetic wave, better known as light. The theory of the universe
being a placid lake has added further clarifications to Maxwell’s model.
Due to the fact that extensive use of mathematical equations and their resolutions will be required to describe those clarifications, such work will have to wait before it can be published on these pages. Meanwhile, I shall endeavor to work on the simplification of both the explanations of the model, and the mathematics that lead to it.