Letting Go of the Aether

We often credit Einstein with discovering everything about the relativity of time and space. But the equations that he used to describe the contraction of space and the dilation of time at high velocities (Lorentz transformations) were already in place a few years prior thanks to Hendrik Lorentz. What Einstein did was fundamentally reinterpret what they meant. Or more significantly, he fundamentally reinterpreted what space and time themselves meant.

Prior thinkers could not escape the idea that there was some primary frame of reference: the aether. Lorentz and others believed that fast moving objects would physically contract and their clocks would physically slow down as they zoomed through the aether. Einstein broke the paradigm of any universal reference point; he flat out denied the aether.

This means: if a rocket was leaving earth at a speed of 0.8c, the people aboard would age more slowly than us. After a year, from our perspective, they would have only aged 7.2 months. But after 1 year from their perspective, we would have only aged 7.2 months! Wild!

This is mind-bending, and it is understandable why others couldn’t arrive at this easily. We have categories of understanding that are difficult to get beyond because letting them go is scary. We hold on to that faithful aether for safety, even for dear life. Meanwhile, it never existed in the first place. We need the courage to reimagine reality, to rethink everything, because we know so much less than we desperately hope we do.