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Isaac Newton suggests the existence of an aether in the Third Book of Opticks (1st ed. 1704; 2nd ed. 1718): "Doth not this aethereal medium in passing out of water, glass, crystal, and other compact and dense bodies in empty spaces, grow denser and denser by degrees, and by that means refract the rays of light not in a point, but by bending them gradually in curve lines? ...
The action of the Einstein-aether theory is generally taken to consist of the sum of the Einstein–Hilbert action with a Lagrange multiplier λ that ensures that the time vector is a unit vector and also with all of the covariant terms involving the time vector u but having at most two derivatives.
The aether hypothesis arose because physicists of that era could not conceive of light waves propagating without a physical medium in which to do so. When experiments failed to detect the hypothesized luminiferous aether, physicists conceived explanations for the experiments' failure which preserved the hypothetical aether's existence.
And in 1899 [A 7] also Lorentz noted for the frequency of oscillating electrons "that in S the time of vibrations be times as great as in S 0", where S 0 is the aether frame, S the mathematical-fictitious frame of the moving observer, k is /, and is an undetermined factor.
A 1933 portrait of E. T. Whittaker by Arthur Trevor Haddon. The book was originally written in the period immediately following the publication of Einstein's Annus Mirabilis papers and several years following the early work of Max Planck; it was a transitional period for physics, where special relativity and old quantum theory were gaining traction.
However, in Lorentz aether theory the existence of an undetectable aether is assumed and the relativity principle holds. The theory was quickly replaced by special relativity, which gave similar formulas without the existence of an unobservable aether. All inertial frames are physically equivalent, in both theories.
This theory described different aether densities, creating an aether density gradient. His theory also proposed that aether is rarified within objects and dense outside them. As particles of denser aether interact with the rare aether they are attracted back to the dense aether much like cooling vapors of water are attracted back to each other ...
By the late 19th century, the existence of the aether was being questioned, although there was no physical theory to replace it. The negative outcome of the Michelson–Morley experiment (1887) suggested that the aether did not exist, a finding that was confirmed in subsequent experiments through the 1920s. This led to considerable theoretical ...