In my current syllabus, this is what is being inferred through various worksheets and some online materials. But I can’t seem to find the right answer anywhere. If Maxwell suggested this, then why was Einstein’s development of special relativity the first one to oppose the existence of Aether, when if Maxwell said ‘light and thereby EM waves don’t need a medium’ then Aether could’ve just been trashed right there
In: Physics
Maxwell’s equations, at the time, could’ve been interpreted as *describing how the aether works*, if one entertained that theory. You must keep in mind that the luminiferous aether was not necessarily proposed to be a detectable material, and that as such it might be present in a vacuum.
You could say with his theory Maxwell showed that if there *was* an aether, then that aether must also be responsible for the propagation of electric and magnetic fields, since EM radiation weaves both together. But it was already known that such fields, and EM radiation, could exist in empty space.
The implication of Einstein’s theory was that there’s no consistent way to think of that aether as having a velocity, or a flow, or anything like that, such that EM radiation might be propagating “upstream” or “downstream” relative to it. No matter what your position or velocity was, the “aether” around you always appeared to be stationary *relative to you* – and that implied that thinking of it as a material at all was a bad approach. The medium would have to be spacetime itself.
I believe that it was already understood that EM waves could travel in a vacuum before Maxwell formulated his equations, since they include the permeability and permittivity of free space.
Einstein wasn’t the first to poke holes in the aether theory. Michelson and Moreley had already done that in 1887.
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