SELF

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S.B. Karavashkin

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the light waves propagation, and the strengths of electric and magnetic fields was identified with the mechanical stresses of ether. The hypothesis of mechanical ether met great difficulties, in particular, the impossibility the light waves to be transverse (that required from the ether to have the properties of absolutely solid body) and the absence of the ether resistance to the celestial motions. From the modern point of view, this hypothesis is absolutely bankrupt, because the forces of elasticity, strain etc. have the electromagnetic nature themselves. The difficulty of mechanical interpretation of the ether made the scientists in the end of 19^th century to abandon the mechanical models of ether. The only item remained unsolved - the ether participation in the bodies motion. The difficulties and contradictions arisen with it were solved by the theory of relativity which lifted the question of ether motion”. “Beginning with that moment and forever, the ether as a substance (! - S. K.) disappears from the theory. The EM field takes its place as a mathematical category offering to describe conveniently the processes occurring in the matter and the correlation between their characteristics” [5, p. 219].

In other words, there exist bodies, particles or, as they are often named, weighty matter, but the interaction between them is a convenient mathematical category and nothing else. It means, if one appeared in a strong EM field and was shocked by a step discharge, this was only a mathematical fiction (or you can read it as an Evil Spirit, because the irreality and non-materiality could affect you only by some preternatural force).

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“They say, the matter has disappeared, and they wish to make gnosiological conclusions. But we would ask, has the mind remained? If it had not, if it has disappeared with the disappearing matter, if with the disappearing brain and nervous system the ideas and senses disappeared too, then, consequently, everything has disappeared, and your reasoning has disappeared as a sample of whatever ‘thought’ (or thoughtlessness)! But if it had, if with the disappearing matter the mind (idea, sensation etc.) is supposed to be non-disappeared, it means that you secretly passed to the viewpoint of philosophical idealism. Just this always happens with the people who wish, for ‘economy’, to mean the motion without matter, because they surreptitiously, just simply proceeding from their reasoning, accept the mind existing after the matter disappeared” [1, p. 251].

Having read this analysis, the relativists may object that Max Born was the ardent supporter of Mach and his philosophical appraisements are incorrect; that the relativity gets on fine with material space and specifically with the matter out of weighty bodies. Only in this case the matter is named the field and, according to Landau, has some specific properties: “The particle-to-particle interaction can be described by means of a force field. Instead saying that one particle affects another one, we can say that it produces a field around itself;

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each particle in this field is under some force affection. In classical mechanics, a field is only one of few ways to describe the phenomenon of particles interaction. But in Relativity, due to the finite velocity of propagation of interaction, the situation essentially changes. The forces affecting on a particle at present moment are not determined by their instant disposition. Any particle displacement affects the others only in some time interval. It means that the field itself becomes the physical reality. We cannot speak about the direct interaction of particles distanced from each other. The interaction can occur at each moment only between the neighbouring points of a space (the short-range interaction). So we have to say that one particle interacts with the field and then the field interacts with another particle” [6, p. 64].

If not going carefully into some shades of this quotation, in particular that Relativity has misappropriated the short-range interaction concept (perhaps Landau forgot that Galilee, Bradley, Doppler, Hertz, Maxwell were not the relativists) and noting that there was not said directly of the force field as a mathematical category and, the more, the interaction between the field per se and a particle in this field is declared, - we can suppose that a field is a material substance characterising the distant interaction of bodies. Then the question is pertinent, will the field disappear as a material substance if we create