There’s 10 days left until the deadline for The Giant’s Shoulders #19! It will be held at The Renaissance Mathematicus, and entries can be submitted through blogcarnival.com or directly to the host blog, as usual!
Check back next Monday for more “miscellaneous” suggestions!
The more I study the history of aether physics, the more I feel that modern physicists underappreciate both the huge influence the theory had on the development of physics and how it indirectly spurred many positive scientific discoveries, even though it is an incorrect theory. The “aether”, for those not familiar with it, was a hypothetical substance theorized in the early 1800s to be the medium in which light waves propagate, just as water waves travel through water and sound waves travel through air. Many papers were written speculating on the nature of the aether before Einstein’s special theory of relativity (1905) argued convincingly that the aether was unnecessary.
Nevertheless, these speculations resulted in a number of interesting results. For instance, we have noted previously that Earnshaw’s theorem (1839), an important result in electromagnetic theory, arose from an attempt to determine the forces that hold the aether together. In 1902, Lord Rayleigh attempted to detect the aether-induced “length contraction” by measuring the birefringence of moving objects, an ingenious attempt that gave a negative result.
In the broadest sense, a “good” theory is one which raises interesting questions that may inevitably be tested by experiment. Even if it proves to be fundamentally incorrect in the end, it has spurred numerous theoretical and experimental results. This can be contrasted with sham “theories” such as intelligent design (the “theory” that living creatures are too complex to have developed without the aid of a creator), which has resulted in no testable predictions and exists only as a way to push religion into the classroom.
By 1900, the aether remained a vexing mystery, and perhaps the foremost scientific problem, for the physicists of the era. It is not surprising that many famous scientists expended considerable energy to try and elucidate its properties. In 1901, a paper appeared in the Philosophical Magazine (Ser. 6, vol. 2, 161-177) by the famous (even infamous) Lord Kelvin, entitled, “On Ether and Gravitational Matter through Infinite Space.” It is not, in fact, an original publication; as Kelvin puts it,
This is an amplification of Lecture XVI, Baltimore, Oct. 15, 1884, now being prepared for print in a volume on Molecular Dynamics and the Wave Theory of Light, which I hope may be published within a year from the present time.
In fact, the article begins with a reprinting of material from 1854, nearly fifty years old! This is, if nothing else, a measure of how baffling the aether was to physicists of the time — material fifty years old was still, in some sense, “state of the art”.
The 1901 paper, as a whole, summarizes Kelvin’s theoretical musings on the nature of the aether, and highlights how perplexing the topic remained before Einstein’s wonderful theory came along and shattered the aether hypothesis once and for all.
Those who follow this site for optics and history of science posts should take at look at this nice post by The Renaissance Mathematicus. It covers the contributions of Johannes Kepler (1571-1630) to the modern theory of optics. Kepler is most known for his astronomical observations, but optics and astronomy go hand-in-hand, for obvious reasons!
See you next Monday!
Via The Huffington Post, I found this story pretty exciting: a Japanese man has made a new world record for the longest duration flight of a paper airplane!
Only one man – Japanese paper airplane virtuoso Takuo Toda – has ever come close to breaking the 30-second barrier. On Sunday, he set a world record for a hand-launched plane made with only paper, but fell just short of the 30-second mark.
Toda, flying a 10-centimeter-long craft of his own design, made 10 attempts to break his own record of 27.9 seconds set earlier this year in Hiroshima but failed to best his previous mark, settling for a 26.1-second flight.
That was still the best ever recorded for a strictly paper-only craft. His 27.9 record was set with a plane that had tape on it.
A lot of engineering can go into paper airplane design, and there are a lot of different styles of airplane with a lot of different flight characteristics. When I was a kid, I had a number of books with both simple and remarkably complicated designs, many of which I can still put together. Congratulations to Takuo Toda!
We arrived in Chicago on the 23rd, just ahead of a nice ice storm. Things were a bit of a mess afterwards, but very pretty:
Merry Christmas to those celebrating, and happy holidays to everyone else!
As my usual Yuletide tradition, I present MST3k’s “A Patrick Swayze Christmas”, more poignant than usual due to the recent passing of Swayze:
Valancourt Books continues to release fascinating literary treasures that have been buried and forgotten for ages! The most recent of these is a collection of stories by M.P. Shiel about his character Prince Zaleski:
We’ve encountered Matthew Phipps Shiel (1865-1947) before on this blog, when I discussed his short tales of weird fiction, most recently collected in The House of Sounds and Others. I found the quality of his writing to be a little uneven, but he does achieve moments of true horror.
Prince Zaleski (1895) represents Shiel’s contribution to the mystery genre, and is his answer to Sherlock Holmes. The ‘compilation’ is a rather short one — only consisting of three stories — but the stories are clever and even wonderfully creepy at times.
Book writing is coming along, and I actually can see light at the end of the tunnel. The biggest section left to write is on tensor analysis, and the biggest difficulty is determining how much to include in my book — tensor analysis isn’t that broadly used in optics, and I don’t want to take up precious page space on it. Beyond that, I’ve got 3 or 4 other small sections to write and/or complete, and they’re the fun ones. With the pressure off me a little bit (and exams graded), I’m planning to write a history of science post later this week.
In the meantime, today we officially declared that we’re going to keep Sophie, the hyperactive foster kitty we picked up last month (right now she’s sitting in my lap, demanding attention.) I managed (through pure luck — my photography skills are lacking) to get a cute pic of her inside the Christmas tree, planning to demolish it:
That’s it for this week! Now, for a quick announcement: it is expected that research blogging will slow down significantly over the holidays, though nobody is sure yet quite how much. I’m planning to post each Monday anyway, though I may post fewer selections depending on the amount of submissions.
See you next Monday!
The author of Skulls in the Stars is a professor of physics, specializing in optical science, at UNC Charlotte. The blog covers topics in physics and optics, the history of science, classic pulp fantasy and horror fiction, and the surprising intersections between these areas. 
Skulls in the Stars 