Miles Mathis - Aether

Miles Mathis mentions the aether in his book. But he doesn't say much about it, so I was left thinking that his thoughts are pretty much the same as mine. However, that turned out to be false. Looking through the articles listed on his webpage, I found one dedicated to the aehter, and it revealed that his ideas about the aether are radically different from mine.

Mathis' aether is not a material thing. It's an abstraction based on the constancy of the speed of light. It's not light itself, nor a pool of particles. It's a fixed background that can be used in his calculations.

This is similar to how Newton introduced mass into his equations in his time. It too is an abstraction. Mass is a convenient name for measurements related to inertia and gravity. However, there's no such thing as mass in the real world. That's why my physics doesn't talk of mass. It talks of inertia and gravity as two separate phenomena. They are linked together by the fact that both relate to particle quanta. However, that doesn't make mass real. Mass is a proxy for the number of particle quanta making up a particular body. These particle quanta are real, but mass is not. It's an abstraction.

Similarly, Mathis's aether can be used in calculations, but there's no point in looking for it in the real world. It only exists as a proxy for the speed of light. That's radically different from my aether which is a mix of low energy photons and neutrinos.

Mathis and I are in two opposite camps. He's primarily concerned with equations, while I'm primarily concerned with physical models. However, this doesn't mean I dislike his article. On the contrary, I found it well worth a read.

Mathis points out that relative speeds can be calculated from red-shifts, and that Einstein's equations transform external data into local values so that a proper timeline of events can be calculated. This means that all events can be mapped onto a universal timeline. We have a background against which all motion can be related, and it is this background that Mathis thinks of when he uses the word aether.

Interestingly, I come to a similar conclusion. All reference frames exist inside some bigger reference frame. A moving car is a reference frame inside the reference frame of our planet, which in turn is a reference frame inside the solar system. This hierarchy has the visible universe as its top node, which can be considered universal and stationary.

But reference frames should not be confused with the aether. Mathis' use of the word is unfortunate. It makes us think that he has some physical medium in mind when in reality, he's thinking of a stationary background.

The universe

By NASA, ESA, H. Teplitz and M. Rafelski (IPAC/Caltech), A. Koekemoer (STScI), R. Windhorst (Arizona State University), and Z. Levay (STScI) - http://hubblesite.org/newscenter/archive/releases/2014/27/image/a/ (image link), Public Domain, Link