N. 3 - 21 aprile 2001 - Giano Bifronte

306
european physicist élite dealt with the study of quantum properties of
microphysical world, and that all counterintuitive "complications" of
quantum mechanics seem due exactly to this absence. Ether could have
been, in principle, very well assumed for being the responsible of
quantum fluctuations, mysterious interference patterns, etc., but this
possibility has never been thoroughly investigated, exactly because of
the negative relativistic influence 2 .
Then, at last, the essential questions remain open: is really general
relativity's formalistic and abstract approach a satisfactory answer to the
fundamental questions regarding the nature of physical space? Or was
all the XXth century theoretical physics on the wrong track, and we
should completely change direction, resurrecting perhaps some old
suggestions, too hastily considered as dead??
1 Another one is concerning Newton's own attitude towards the ether, which was
rather multifarious (perhaps even a bit ambiguous?!), and which generated
accordingly multiple theories of light: but people (like the "newtonian" Bradley
himself, the discoverer of astronomical annual aberration) generally remember him
only for the corpuscular theory, which is more coherent with the hypothesis of an
empty space.
2 For instance, according to the physicists B.H. Lavenda and E. Santamato:
"Quantum indeterminism is explainable in terms of the random interactions between
quantum particles and the underlying medium in which they supposedly move"
("The Underlying Brownian Motion of Nonrelativistic Quantum Mechanics",
Foundations of Physics, Vol. 11, N. 9/10, 1981, p. 654); "It might perhaps be
possible to develop a completely classical formulation of quantum mechanics based
upon the irregular motion of a single Brownian particle immersed in a suspension of
lighter particles" ("Stochastic Interpretations of Nonrelativistic Quantum Theory",
Int. J. of Th. Physics, Vol. 23, N. 7, 1984).
(UB)