There Is Nothing in This World More Helpless and Depraved than a Man in the Depths of a Luminiferous Aether Binge : Science After Sunclipse

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Blake Stacey is a physics boffin and science-fiction writer who wandered the Earth and eventually settled in the nation-state of Denial.

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There Is Nothing in This World More Helpless and Depraved than a Man in the Depths of a Luminiferous Aether Binge

Category: Classical mechanics • Electromagnetism • Science history • Special Relativity
Posted on: April 16, 2009 8:52 AM, by Blake Stacey

It makes you behave like the village clergyman in an early English physics textbook.

It is interesting to note that Earnshaw himself was concerned with quite a different problem: the nature of the "aether", which we have talked about quite a few times in the past (see here and here, for instance). In the early 1800s, scientists had determined that light has wavelike properties; however, this insight raised many new questions. All waves observed at the time were known to travel in a medium of some sort: water waves travel in water, sound waves travel in air. By analogy, scientists of the 1800s assumed that light must travel in some as yet unobserved medium, dubbed the aether. (They were wrong; light oscillates without any material medium, and Einstein's theory of relativity would be the end of serious aether physics.)
Theorists began to speculate on what sort of material could have properties consistent with the observed properties of light, and Earnshaw attempted to determine the nature of the forces between the fundamental particles of the aether. He found that a system of particles could not be in stable equilibrium if the forces involved followed an inverse square law, in which the force between two particles is a function of $1/r^2$ , where $r$ is the distance between the particles. Such a law is followed by gravity, electricity and magnetism. He concluded that the aether must be affected by two forces: an inverse square law force which is attractive, and a force which is not inverse square and is repulsive. Earnshaw's speculations about the aether are now obsolete and mostly forgotten, but his observations about inverse square law forces were of fundamental importance.