Sigh. What a year. Wait! What? Did you just say those favored by sycophantic media are now receiving awards and praise? Let me get this straight. The NY governor, who instituted a policy—once published on the state’s website, but since removed—to put elderly with COVID-19 back into poorly equipped nursing homes, where, though the “official” number now stands at about 6,700 dead, the actual number is much higher (who knows, since the figures for COVID deaths have been manipulated for various political reasons—has written a self-aggrandizing book on his handling of the pandemic, has missed more than a dozen meetings (some on the vaccines) to which he was invited by the White House, has held press conferences with few challenges (a recent one got the reporter berated by the Gov), and has gone on book tours while shutting down the schools against the advice of “scientists”—depends on who’s labeled thus, I guess. Are the sycophantic press people analogs of all those who, before a nineteenth-century experiment disproving its existence, sought the aether, these modern analogs wishing to fill vacuums in their lives and perspectives?
Remember the aether? It was the supposed substance that filled all space, the stuff through which light traveled and “waved,” the universal background of something because no one before Michelson and Morley’s experiment could comprehend emptiness, that is, nothing. Of course, we still can’t really comprehend nothing. For us, everything is something because nothing is nothing. We have to give the nineteenth-century experimenters credit for demonstrating that the aether was as real as flying unicorns. They looked and found “nothing.” They demonstrated that light could move through the vacuum of space; it needed no medium to propagate. There truly was no “there” there. It existed only in the minds of those who imagined it.*
We haven’t given up on looking for what might not exist. We think there are “strings” underlying the stuff of the universe, but we don’t have any way of demonstrating that they truly exist other than our mathematical descriptions. They make sense, even contribute to the Standard Model; yet, we can’t run an experiment to demonstrate they exist. And we have a similar desire to look for something else that might not exist: The axions of Dark Matter. Haven’t found them yet. Assuming they are there, scientists are trying hard to demonstrate they exist, most recently through the use of the giant (football-field diameter) radio telescope in West Virginia.** Maybe they do exist.
Not that the invisible can’t show up on our machines. We can use an ordinary radio “to see” radio waves and microwaves. That static between AM channels is the famous Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation, the Echo of the Big Bang. So, yes, some “things” that are invisible can be “seen” with the right instrumentation. But those strings and Dark Matter axions are troubling indeed. Should we spend time and money “to see” them?
The aether doesn’t exist. We know that. The 1887 experiment to demonstrate its fictional nature cost very little money. Tabletop stuff compared with the Large Hadron Collider. But the experiments to find Dark Matter axions and strings are costly, for the latter, prohibitively costly because such attempts would require making the LHC more powerful. But what if we’re wrong about the nature of Dark Matter, that the as yet unseen axions exist. After all, “axions” are just a guess, maybe a good guess, but a guess nevertheless. However, I suppose one could say, “Just because we haven’t yet seen the axions, doesn’t mean they aren’t there. You know the old saying that the absence of evidence isn’t evidence of absence. Besides, what else can affect the rotation of galaxies other than invisible Dark Matter?”
We humans spend lots of time looking for things that might or might not exist. I think of those “ghost” TV reality shows, replete with some electromagnetic sensors of some kind. I know we humans are electrical beings, but do we really retain all those positive and negative charges in spirit? You know that old expression about not being able to “take it with you.” I’m guessing, but since there’s really no way to prove my hypothesis, that I’m going out on the proverbial galactic arm to say that spirit isn’t electrical. Yet, those reality shows have fans who await the results of a prerecorded episode seemingly unaware that if someone really and undisputedly found and videoed a “real” ghost, that the newspapers, TV, and internet sources would be awash in the coverage of the story. “Let’s wait through the season’s episodes,” the fan says. I ask, “Will the last episode of the season reveal whether or not someone shook hands with Big Foot in his forest lair?”
We humans want mystery to be real, and yet, we want a comprehensible universe. But we are fascinated by all that we merely suspect. Aliens, for example. We write and read and watch fiction, earthbound and otherworldly. We want “to see” all the universe’s components, even those that are invisible. We want to pin down that which doesn’t lend itself to pricking by real pins.
Anecdote: Looking for a channel that carried a particular football game, I stumbled upon a program in which a woman, dressed in scuba gear, was going diving with others in search of some underwater hiding place aliens use to conceal their spaceships. I didn’t stay on the program for more than a minute, but why would anyone watch. If she had discovered spaceships under the water, wouldn’t the world know within minutes. “Here’s the video.” Watch it on any one of a number of social media platforms.
But, hold on! Surely, I’m not suggesting that there is no room for discovery, that, for example, Dark Matter doesn’t exist. Look at how the galaxies move. There’s something definitely there; something at work to keep them from rotating as expected. This Dark Matter stuff appears to have a gravitational effect on aggregations of hundreds of billions to trillions of stars. That’s evidence that it exists, right? Yes, but… But “seeing it” is a different kind of knowing. You can tell me that a house is haunted, but I want to “see “the “ghost” that I know isn’t photoshopped or otherwise manufactured. I want to hold a Dark Matter axion. I want to see a “string” the way I see highly magnified viruses. We know viruses by more than their effects. We have the pics!
But we might never be able to identify the exact nature of “things” that are invisible, not just to the naked eye, but also to instruments like that giant Green Bank Radio Telescope. What if we are relegated to knowing things only by their effect without knowing their nature. What if we never fully understand Dark Energy. Do Dark Matter axions exist? Who knows? Maybe they do. There are some very bright people looking for them with some very expensive equipment. And there are some equally bright people looking for strings. It’s just that they really don’t know whether the looking will bear any fruit. We can praise them, I guess, for persistent looking, though there might be more practical ways to spend one’s time, like finding ways to improve the human condition. Whoa! That sounds anti-theoretical science. Hold on. Lots of Good and goods have come from purely theoretical searches made practical by later scientists and engineers. Flying machines, for example. Wouldn’t Leonardo be amazed to see a helicopter? Thank you, Sikorsky, for all those life-flight rescues.
But didn’t I start all this with a complaint about the governor of New York? Is this a political thing? Am I one of the disgruntled? What’s all this science stuff have to do with Cuomo?
Actually, the lesson applies to all of us, regardless of our political or social perspectives. We tend to latch onto that which we believe “is there,” regardless of our lack of proof or of “negative hypotheses.” For everyone before Michelson and Morley, the aether might just as well have been real. It worked in their minds by satisfying a need that all was right with the world as they saw it, that the world worked the way it “should” work. For the sycophants who ask no challenging questions and who fail to pursue the possibility that the received isn’t necessarily the acceptable, the governor’s explanations of how his world works for all, or how it is the “best of all possible worlds,” to use Voltaire’s satirical phrase, have been acceptable. He provided the "best of all possible pandemic worlds"; 'nough said. No more questions.
And, of course, a media leaning to one side easily sees the aether of any claim by that side as a reality, that “Russian Collusion” stuff, for example. It wasn’t there, but it worked to explain the world they wanted, the world as it “should” be.
We will never rid ourselves of “aethers.” It appears to be in our nature to see them even when we can’t really see them. If they work for us and explain the world we want, we will be satisfied until some Michelson-Morley experiment proves irrefutably otherwise.
What are the “aethers” in your worldview?
*There’s nothing (had to use that word) new here: Darling of the 1960s press, Kennedy had to answer no questions about infidelity; Darling of the 1990s, Clinton had to answer no questions about sexual abuse until abused women spoke up; Darling of the 2000s, Obama received the Nobel for, as he asked, “For what?” and had to answer few if any questions about obviously questionable actions like Fast and Furious and election interference; and Darling of this decade, Biden has had few questions about his family’s rise to wealth seemingly associated with his vice presidency—although I did see one reporter ask him what kind of ice cream he had chosen. Sigh. And Darling of 2020, Cuomo has not been persistently challenged on his pandemic policy—but he did get a book deal and press coverage that "earned" him an Emmy.
**Fadelli, Ingrid. Searching for axion dark matter conversion signals in the magnetic fields around neutron stars. Phys.org. 20 Nov 2020. Online at https://phys.org/news/2020-11-axion-dark-conversion-magnetic-fields.html Accessed November 22, 2020.
Remember the aether? It was the supposed substance that filled all space, the stuff through which light traveled and “waved,” the universal background of something because no one before Michelson and Morley’s experiment could comprehend emptiness, that is, nothing. Of course, we still can’t really comprehend nothing. For us, everything is something because nothing is nothing. We have to give the nineteenth-century experimenters credit for demonstrating that the aether was as real as flying unicorns. They looked and found “nothing.” They demonstrated that light could move through the vacuum of space; it needed no medium to propagate. There truly was no “there” there. It existed only in the minds of those who imagined it.*
We haven’t given up on looking for what might not exist. We think there are “strings” underlying the stuff of the universe, but we don’t have any way of demonstrating that they truly exist other than our mathematical descriptions. They make sense, even contribute to the Standard Model; yet, we can’t run an experiment to demonstrate they exist. And we have a similar desire to look for something else that might not exist: The axions of Dark Matter. Haven’t found them yet. Assuming they are there, scientists are trying hard to demonstrate they exist, most recently through the use of the giant (football-field diameter) radio telescope in West Virginia.** Maybe they do exist.
Not that the invisible can’t show up on our machines. We can use an ordinary radio “to see” radio waves and microwaves. That static between AM channels is the famous Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation, the Echo of the Big Bang. So, yes, some “things” that are invisible can be “seen” with the right instrumentation. But those strings and Dark Matter axions are troubling indeed. Should we spend time and money “to see” them?
The aether doesn’t exist. We know that. The 1887 experiment to demonstrate its fictional nature cost very little money. Tabletop stuff compared with the Large Hadron Collider. But the experiments to find Dark Matter axions and strings are costly, for the latter, prohibitively costly because such attempts would require making the LHC more powerful. But what if we’re wrong about the nature of Dark Matter, that the as yet unseen axions exist. After all, “axions” are just a guess, maybe a good guess, but a guess nevertheless. However, I suppose one could say, “Just because we haven’t yet seen the axions, doesn’t mean they aren’t there. You know the old saying that the absence of evidence isn’t evidence of absence. Besides, what else can affect the rotation of galaxies other than invisible Dark Matter?”
We humans spend lots of time looking for things that might or might not exist. I think of those “ghost” TV reality shows, replete with some electromagnetic sensors of some kind. I know we humans are electrical beings, but do we really retain all those positive and negative charges in spirit? You know that old expression about not being able to “take it with you.” I’m guessing, but since there’s really no way to prove my hypothesis, that I’m going out on the proverbial galactic arm to say that spirit isn’t electrical. Yet, those reality shows have fans who await the results of a prerecorded episode seemingly unaware that if someone really and undisputedly found and videoed a “real” ghost, that the newspapers, TV, and internet sources would be awash in the coverage of the story. “Let’s wait through the season’s episodes,” the fan says. I ask, “Will the last episode of the season reveal whether or not someone shook hands with Big Foot in his forest lair?”
We humans want mystery to be real, and yet, we want a comprehensible universe. But we are fascinated by all that we merely suspect. Aliens, for example. We write and read and watch fiction, earthbound and otherworldly. We want “to see” all the universe’s components, even those that are invisible. We want to pin down that which doesn’t lend itself to pricking by real pins.
Anecdote: Looking for a channel that carried a particular football game, I stumbled upon a program in which a woman, dressed in scuba gear, was going diving with others in search of some underwater hiding place aliens use to conceal their spaceships. I didn’t stay on the program for more than a minute, but why would anyone watch. If she had discovered spaceships under the water, wouldn’t the world know within minutes. “Here’s the video.” Watch it on any one of a number of social media platforms.
But, hold on! Surely, I’m not suggesting that there is no room for discovery, that, for example, Dark Matter doesn’t exist. Look at how the galaxies move. There’s something definitely there; something at work to keep them from rotating as expected. This Dark Matter stuff appears to have a gravitational effect on aggregations of hundreds of billions to trillions of stars. That’s evidence that it exists, right? Yes, but… But “seeing it” is a different kind of knowing. You can tell me that a house is haunted, but I want to “see “the “ghost” that I know isn’t photoshopped or otherwise manufactured. I want to hold a Dark Matter axion. I want to see a “string” the way I see highly magnified viruses. We know viruses by more than their effects. We have the pics!
But we might never be able to identify the exact nature of “things” that are invisible, not just to the naked eye, but also to instruments like that giant Green Bank Radio Telescope. What if we are relegated to knowing things only by their effect without knowing their nature. What if we never fully understand Dark Energy. Do Dark Matter axions exist? Who knows? Maybe they do. There are some very bright people looking for them with some very expensive equipment. And there are some equally bright people looking for strings. It’s just that they really don’t know whether the looking will bear any fruit. We can praise them, I guess, for persistent looking, though there might be more practical ways to spend one’s time, like finding ways to improve the human condition. Whoa! That sounds anti-theoretical science. Hold on. Lots of Good and goods have come from purely theoretical searches made practical by later scientists and engineers. Flying machines, for example. Wouldn’t Leonardo be amazed to see a helicopter? Thank you, Sikorsky, for all those life-flight rescues.
But didn’t I start all this with a complaint about the governor of New York? Is this a political thing? Am I one of the disgruntled? What’s all this science stuff have to do with Cuomo?
Actually, the lesson applies to all of us, regardless of our political or social perspectives. We tend to latch onto that which we believe “is there,” regardless of our lack of proof or of “negative hypotheses.” For everyone before Michelson and Morley, the aether might just as well have been real. It worked in their minds by satisfying a need that all was right with the world as they saw it, that the world worked the way it “should” work. For the sycophants who ask no challenging questions and who fail to pursue the possibility that the received isn’t necessarily the acceptable, the governor’s explanations of how his world works for all, or how it is the “best of all possible worlds,” to use Voltaire’s satirical phrase, have been acceptable. He provided the "best of all possible pandemic worlds"; 'nough said. No more questions.
And, of course, a media leaning to one side easily sees the aether of any claim by that side as a reality, that “Russian Collusion” stuff, for example. It wasn’t there, but it worked to explain the world they wanted, the world as it “should” be.
We will never rid ourselves of “aethers.” It appears to be in our nature to see them even when we can’t really see them. If they work for us and explain the world we want, we will be satisfied until some Michelson-Morley experiment proves irrefutably otherwise.
What are the “aethers” in your worldview?
*There’s nothing (had to use that word) new here: Darling of the 1960s press, Kennedy had to answer no questions about infidelity; Darling of the 1990s, Clinton had to answer no questions about sexual abuse until abused women spoke up; Darling of the 2000s, Obama received the Nobel for, as he asked, “For what?” and had to answer few if any questions about obviously questionable actions like Fast and Furious and election interference; and Darling of this decade, Biden has had few questions about his family’s rise to wealth seemingly associated with his vice presidency—although I did see one reporter ask him what kind of ice cream he had chosen. Sigh. And Darling of 2020, Cuomo has not been persistently challenged on his pandemic policy—but he did get a book deal and press coverage that "earned" him an Emmy.
**Fadelli, Ingrid. Searching for axion dark matter conversion signals in the magnetic fields around neutron stars. Phys.org. 20 Nov 2020. Online at https://phys.org/news/2020-11-axion-dark-conversion-magnetic-fields.html Accessed November 22, 2020.
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