| MadSci Network: Physics |
Hi Ken,
I am afraid I don't really know much about these ideas. I found a reference in the "Mac Tutor History of Mathematics Archive", where they quote Maxwell's famous A dynamical theory of the electromagnetic field,
After tracing to the action of the surrounding medium both the magnetic and the electric attractions and repulsions, and finding them to depend on the inverse square of the distance, we are naturally led to inquire whether the attraction of gravitation, which follows the same law of the distance, is not also traceable to the action of a surrounding medium.Also Lorentz followed similar ideas and they are all connected with the concept of the aether which was discarded by Einstein.But I doubt that these ideas have really been well established, I think they have always been at the level of debate and never been fully accepted by the "physics community" (and I don't want to say that only "good" or "true" theories are accepted and only "wrong" theories are rejected by the "physics community", whatever "physics community" really means). Nevertheless Einstein worked hard on and dreamed of a unified theory of gravity and electromagnetism. As far as I know, Einstein worked on a geometric formulation (as there is for gravitation) of electromagnetism.
[...]
As I am unable to understand in what way a medium can possess such properties, I cannot go further in this direction in searching for the cause of gravitation.
You can find a vast amount of webpages dealing with aether and related
ideas using any search engine, e.g., google. But I'm afraid you can trust
the arguments and conclusions of only very few pages. Most articles in
favour of the concept of the aether are rather "dubious". I don't exactly
know whether
you can reconcile aether theory with the Michelson-Moreley experiment, but
I know that you don't need the concept of the aether for general
relativity, which works nicely. I don't see reasons to give up a beautiful
geometric formulation of gravity, which displaces a striking similarity
with gauge theories of elementary particle physics. All these concepts
seem to be sound and seem to work together nicely, indeed.
To answer your question, I don't know any concise and nice book or article
on aether theory and gravitation, I'm afraid.
greetings,
Michael
Try the links in the MadSci Library for more information on Physics.