The reason for the people postulated the existence of the ether, was that it was assumed that light needed a medium to travel through (there are other relevant effects also, but this was the basic one). Once it was accepted that light can travel through a vacuum, the need for an ether was mostly gone.

 

The virtual particles come from nothing, and return to nothing. Virtual particles are always created in pairs. For example, a virtual electron is always created alongside a virtual positron. These then annihilate each other, returning the energy that they "borrowed" from space.

 

There are experiments that show the existence of virtual particles. One specific one that I'm thinking of involved virtual photons. I'll go look for the details on it and post them back.

 

I highly recommend the book "Schrodinger's kittens" as it explains all of these things very well.

 

"The Elegant Universe" by Brian Greene is another good book to read. It goes much more in depth than the TV show.

Aren't you saying both things at the same time? The problem with "aether" is only if you consider it to comprise a massive field. Thus the "virtual quantum" ground state vacuum does, to my thinking (and to those in the Polarizable Vacuum school of thought), give support for the concept of a more subtle medium. It is Lorentz invariant and so fills the bill.

Aren't you saying both things at the same time? The problem with "aether" is only if you consider it to comprise a massive field. Thus the "virtual quantum" ground state vacuum does, to my thinking (and to those in the Polarizable Vacuum school of thought), give support for the concept of a more subtle medium. It is Lorentz invariant and so fills the bill.

 

You lost me

Don't you see the virtual field as you described it to be a medium? "Lorentz invariant" means your LOCAL physics does not change between relative states of velocity or gravitation.

I'll leave that one to the theoretical physicists. That level is way above my understanding of things.

I doubt this. I enjoyed a six-month correspondence with Hal Puthoff (of PV theory) after he read my paper. He said he loosely considers the vacuum like an electron-positron plasma. Such a medium jiggles to propagate light. Just so we theoretically make them have no mass...