The Necessary Structure of the All-pervading Aether
About this book
In this book I investigate the necessary structure of the aether – the stuff that fills the whole universe. Some of my conclusions are. 1. There is an enormous variety of structures that the aether might, for all we know, have. 2. Probably the aether is point-free. 3. In that case, it should be distinguished from Space-time, which is either a fiction or a construct. 4. Even if the aether has points, we should reject the orthodoxy that all regions are grounded in points by summation. 5. If the aether is point-free but not continuous, its most likely structure has extended atoms that are not simples. 6. Space-time is symmetric if and only if the aether is continuous. 7. If the aether is continuous, we should reject the standard interpretation of General Relativity, in which geometry determines gravity. 8. Contemporary physics undermines an objection to discrete aether based on scale invariance, but does not offer much positive support.
Topics
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Frontmatter
i -
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Introduction
1 -
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1. A Survey of Hypotheses about the Aether’s Structure
27 -
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2. Conflicting Intuitions
56 -
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3. Which Intuition to Abandon?
71 -
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4. Hypervolume and Topology
101 -
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5. The Problem with Differentiable Manifolds
117 -
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6. Contemporary Physics and Discrete Aether
137 -
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7. Symmetric Space-time
173 -
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Conclusions
194 -
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Glossary
196 -
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References
211 -
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Index
221
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