Dark Energy vs Quantum Vacuums vs Aristotle's Aether

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Techne

Registered Senior Member
In physics there are two kinds of empty space (or space-time if you want). There is the empty quantized space of quantum electrodynamics and quantum field theory, and there is empty, smooth and continuous space of general relativity.

In quantum physics, vacuum states are associated with zero-point energy. Zero-point energy (ZPE) applies to the strong, the weak and the electromagnetic interactions. In general relativity, dark energy is associated with vacuum energy.

If quantum theory and general relativity are to be harmonized one can see why ZPE and dark energy can be the same thing.

The Calphysics Institute has a good piece on the zero-point energy of quantum physics and NASA has a reasonable piece on Dark Energy.

So where does Aristotle's aether fit in? Well some Greek philosophers (Aristotle among others for example) viewed it as a fifth element, a substance on its own or Quintessence. So what is Aristotle's aether?

Christopher A. Decaen in his article "Aristotle's Aether And Contemporary Science" has a good discussion concerning this matter.

1) Aristotle's aether was a celestial substance or celestial matter.
2) It is simple and not a compound of elements and thus neither heavy nor light.
3) It is only effected by only one internal principle or cause.
4) It is ungenerable and incorruptible, and that it is not capable of growth or alteration. It follows then that "aether's prime matter and substantial form must be so perfectly united that the latter must actualize and thereby exhaust the potency of the former".
5) Aether can act upon other substances without being able to be acted upon.

If empty space is to become Aristotle's ether then some of Aristotle's views will have to be left behind. For example, the contemporary version would have to change as follows:

1) The Contemporary Aristotelian Ethereal Substance will have to be everywhere where there is empty space, not just a celestial substance.
2) It has to be generable. The universe and thus space expands.

The rest of the properties of Aristotle's aether seem pretty straight forward to harmonize with empty space. Empty space, like Aristotle's aether has an effect on normal substances.Lawrence Krauss argues in his book 'Quintessence: The Mystery of the Missing Mass says:

Remember that the effect of a nonzero vacuum energy is to cause space to expand and for this expansion to accelerate. Objects moving away from us will therefore speed up. We can then ask the following question: How far away will objects get before they are traveling away from us faster than the speed of light? This may sound like a silly question. After all, Einstein told us that nothing can travel faster than light! However, when he developed General Relativity, the wording of this law had to be revised. Nothing can travel through space faster than the speed of light. However, space can do whatever it wants! It can expand or contract faster than the speed of light, and objects at rest in an expanding space will be carried away from us along with the space. Thus, the effect of a vacuum energy will be to cause all objects farther than a certain distance away from us to be receding from us faster than the speed of light. Put another way, such objects could not be seen.

Lawrence M. Krauss. Quintessence The Search For Missing Mass In The Universe (Kindle Locations 4383-4389). Kindle Edition.
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Thus the effect of this nonzero vacuum energy is to cause space to expand when applied to general relativity. In quantum mechanics, ZPE produces a net force aka the Casimir effect.

Einstein was not against the idea of an aether in general relativity and Paul Dirac was open to the idea in quantum field theory (See Aristotle's Aether And Contemporary Science).

So there are good reasons to view Dark energy and quantum fluctuations as essentially the same thing and analogous to Aristotle's aether. The contemporary description of the substance would thus be something as follows:

Contemporary Aristotelian Ethereal Substance: The prime matter and substantial form of Contemporary Aristotelian Ethereal Substance (empty space of quantum mechanics and general relativity) are united so that the the form exhausts the potency of the prime matter in such a manner that the only change associated with it is its own expansion and the production of a force on other substances due to its active power i.e. nonzero vacuum energy.
 
Related questions: why does it happen so frequently that people want to make a point of linking objective physicalities to perceptual cognition? Are people so afraid they're hallucinating that they need to persistently establish a link between their perceptions and something else external to them? Is sophism this strong an undercurrent in the human psyche that it has to be rigorously challenged at the expense of ontological neutrality?
 
Mind Over Matter said:
Related questions: why does it happen so frequently that people want to make a point of linking objective physicalities to perceptual cognition?
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People want to be realists?


QUOTE=Mind Over Matter;2817755]Are people so afraid they're hallucinating that they need to persistently establish a link between their perceptions and something else external to them? Is sophism this strong an undercurrent in the human psyche that it has to be rigorously challenged at the expense of ontological neutrality?[/QUOTE]
Do you mean solipsism?

What do you mean by "ontological neutrality"?
 
Techne said:
People want to be realists?
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What exactly do you mean by realists?

Techne said:
Do you mean solipsism?
Click to expand...
Sophism
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

"Sophist" redirects here. For the work of Plato, see Sophist (dialogue).
Not to be confused with Sophisma.

Sophism in the modern definition is a specious argument used for deceiving someone. In Ancient Greece, sophists were a category of teachers who specialized in using the tools of philosophy and rhetoric for the purpose of teaching aretê — excellence, or virtue — predominantly to young statesmen and nobility. The practice of charging money for education (and providing wisdom only to those who can pay) led to the condemnations made by Plato (through Socrates in his dialogues). Plato regarded their profession itself as being 'specious' or 'deceptive', hence the modern meaning of the term.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sophism

Techne said:
What do you mean by "ontological neutrality"?
Click to expand...

Taken from Stanford Encylopedia of Philosophy

8. Ontological neutrality

Aristotle assumes that universal generalizations have existential import; ‘All men are mortal’ implies that there are men. But consider linked quantifications such as ‘All trespassers will be shot. All survivors will be shot again.’ The conjunction of these two universal generalizations is not a contradiction. The conjunction is false if there is a wounded trespasser who fails to be re-shot. But it can be true if all potential trespassers heed the warning. The force of the warning is conditional; ‘IF there is a trespasser, THEN he will be shot. And IF he survives this shooting, THEN he will be shot again.’

Twentieth century logicians were impressed by generalizations such as ‘All immortals live forever’ that do not commit to the existence of the subject items. They also wanted to preserve the intuitive equivalence between ‘All men are mortal’ and its contrapositive ‘All immortals are non-men’. They analyzed universal generalizations as conditionals: ‘All men are mortal’ means ‘For each x, if x is a man, then x is mortal’. If there are no men, then the generalization is vacuously true. Nevertheless, the logicians still insisted that the universal quantifier has existential import; if all is water, then there exists some water.

Even with this revision, classical logic militates against the empty world. Since its universal quantifier has existential import, each of its logical laws imply that something exists. For instance, the principle of identity, Everything is identical to itself entails There exists something that is identical to itself. All sorts of attractive inferences are jeopardized by the empty world.

Logicians do not treat their intolerance of the empty world as a resource for metaphysicians. They do not want to get involved in metaphysical disputes. They feel that logic should be neutral with respect to the existence of anything. They yearn to rectify this “defect in logical purity” (Russell 1919, 203).

The ideal of ontological neutrality has led some philosophers to reject classical logic. A direct response would be to be challenge the existential import of the classical quantifiers.

Proponents of “free logic” prefer to challenge the existential presupposition of singular terms (Lambert 2003, 124). In classical logic, names must have referents. Free logic lacks this restriction and so countenances empty names as in ‘Sherlock Holmes is a detective’ and negative existentials such as ‘Pegasus does not exist’.

These changes would have implications for W. V. Quine's (1953a) popular criterion for ontological commitment. Quine says that we can read off our ontology from the existentially quantified statements constituting our well-accepted theories. For instance, if evolutionary theory says that there are some species that evolved from other species, and if we have no way to paraphrase away this claim, then biologists are committed to the existence of species. Since philosophers cannot improve on the credentials of a scientific commitment, metaphysicians would also be obliged to accept species.

So how does Quine defend his criterion of ontological commitment from the menace looming from the empty domain? By compromise. Normally one thinks of a logical theorem as a proposition that holds in all domains. Quine (1953b, 162) suggests that we weaken the requirement to that of holding in all non-empty domains. In the rare circumstances in which the empty universe must be considered, there is an easy way of testing which theorems will apply: count all the universal quantifications as true, and all the existential quantifications as false, and then compute for the remaining theorems.

Is Quine being ad hoc? Maybe. But exceptions are common for notions in the same family as the empty domain. For instance, instructors halt their students' natural pattern of thinking about division to forestall the disaster that accrues from permitting division by zero. If numbers were words, zero would be an irregular verb.
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Mind Over Matter said:
What exactly do you mean by realists?
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The subject is discussed here a little.


Mind Over Matter said:
Sophism
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

"Sophist" redirects here. For the work of Plato, see Sophist (dialogue).
Not to be confused with Sophisma.

Sophism in the modern definition is a specious argument used for deceiving someone. In Ancient Greece, sophists were a category of teachers who specialized in using the tools of philosophy and rhetoric for the purpose of teaching aretê — excellence, or virtue — predominantly to young statesmen and nobility. The practice of charging money for education (and providing wisdom only to those who can pay) led to the condemnations made by Plato (through Socrates in his dialogues). Plato regarded their profession itself as being 'specious' or 'deceptive', hence the modern meaning of the term.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sophism


Mind Over Matter said:
Taken from Stanford Encylopedia of Philosophy
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I see.
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Techne said:
The subject is discussed here a little.
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Many philosophers try to make reality fit their world view, whereas Aristotle tried to make his world view fit reality.

***
Plato always operated under the principle that wherever there is a multiplicity, there must be a prior unity, and as such if there were multiple gods, there one have to bve one form of god which was higher than them all, and this form would have all of the perfection of what it was to be god. That would seem to be closer to a monotheistic position, which is why the Church Fathers loved him and saw him as a precursor to Christianity.

The over-simplification is that Aristotle was right on almost everthing and Plato was wrong. One of the biggest contributions of Aristotle was the paradigm shift which settled an age old question of the pre-Socratics. Earlier philosophers held to what seemed an obvious formula. "What is is, and what is not is not." Something cannot both be and not be. While it seemed obvious, it lead to some crazy notions. Plato came up with the notion of participation as a means of partially solving the problem, but it was insufficient. Aristotle came up with the idea of potentiality which completely solved the problem.
 
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Agreed, I think Aristotelian metaphysics does seem to be more coherent and compatible with the facts of reality.
 
. . . discussions remind me of those intellgent posts made previously (elsewhere on Sciforum) by that renowned "Senior Scientist of the Universe" (ME, tee hee!) . . .



wlminex
 
The Quantum vacuum (or ZPE, also once known as the 'Dirac Sea') is a consequence of
Heisenberg's uncertainty relation between energy and time.

Its an interesting and really important concept.

There is a BBC program series 'Everything and Nothing' by Jim al-Khalili, part 2 'Nothing' deals with this topic.
 
Einstein's Theory Of Relativity used a formula first proposed by Hermann Minkowski. Although Einstein may have come up with the formula without Hermann Minkowski's papers it was still proposed by Hermann Minkowski first. Yet Hermann Minkowski wrote the formula to describe the Aether, and to help solve the Michelson Morley experiment, by giving the Aether the physics that would work better in the Universe. Einstein accepted that his theory worked with the Aether, but said it also worked if you ignore the Aether altogether. In hindsight, it was a mistake to say that. By taking the present as all possibilities of space-time possibilities you are really hoping that nothing will crop up where the Aether becomes the missing ingredient. Unfortunately, it had already cropped up. The Aether was required, and it was required for an ancient problem.. gravity. Because nobody was taking much notice of Gravity, it was thought to involve Gravitons, so for some reason it was shoved into heads as Gravitons. This is the reason you don't skip something as important as Gravity from a theory. You need the Aether for Gravity, this then gives you the bend that is required for Relativity to work. people who say "Ignore the cause, and just go with the effect." Are making mistakes. Take a look at some maths....

E=MC2

E = effect
M = effect
C = effect

Too much maths with no cause.

Personally I only work on Cause, and I just let the effects happen on their own. This is my method to remove the forced formulas. If maths is all effects, then it isn't a proof.
 
Elterish said:
The Quantum vacuum (or ZPE, also once known as the 'Dirac Sea') is a consequence of
Heisenberg's uncertainty relation between energy and time.
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No, it isn't. Non-relativistic quantum mechanics has the uncertainty principle but no Dirac sea. The Dirac sea concept arose in the development of quantum field theory, where particles can be made and destroyed, including by energy flucuations in the vacuum.

And ZPE is the energy of the vacuum, not the vacuum itself. You're conflating an object with one of its properties.
 
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