TITLE:
Equivalence Principle and Ether: Two Revolutionary Kernels of Einstein’s General Relativity
AUTHORS:
Salvo D’agostino
KEYWORDS:
Einstein, Maxwell, Heaviside, Hertz, Cassirer
JOURNAL NAME:
Advances in Historical Studies,
Vol.5 No.5,
December
30,
2016
ABSTRACT: Einstein’s discovery of the Equivalence Principle is
to be considered as the most fundamental concept at the origin of his General
Relativity. I highlight that the ether problem is related with Enstein’s
conception of gravitational waves as a perturbation of the space-time
curvature, formalized as a specific space-time process, and not as the effect
of a whatever supporting medium. Quite differently, the nineteenth century
field theory of gravitation supported by physicists such as Maxwell, Heaviside,
and Hertz, was based on a search for substantial ether, and on a parallelism with Maxwell’s
theory of electromagnetic waves. The negative results of their theories proved
that parallelism was a wrong approach. Einstein’s genius superseded their
approach by considering that it was not a matter of the ether’s constitution,
but of a fundamental change in the role and nature of physics. In my paper I
refer to Einstein’s different approaches to ether since his 1905 Special
Relativity up to his 1950’ views. I argue that his different attempts were
symptoms of the difficulty of his revolutionary innovation.