Highlighted Review
One of the most recent book reviews on goodreads.com
https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/61766635
“Fekri wants to resurrect the ether. Isaac Newton supposed that light was made of tiny particles, or corpuscles, what we now call photons. Einstein confirmed that with his analysis of the photoelectric effect. A photon of light hits a surface and blasts free an electron. It’s the basis of solar cells that generate electricity, the CCDs that capture images in digital cameras, and the digital x-rays your dentist uses to image your teeth.
Fekri says that’s the wrong way to see things. Light is not made of particles but is entirely wavelike. Electromagnetic waves travel through the invisible luminiferous ether that fills all the space in the universe. Einstein got it wrong. Neils Bohr got it wrong. Your college physics text told you wrong.
This book attempts two goals. One, overthrow corpuscularism and re-establish the wave theory of light. Two, re-establish the luminiferous ether as the medium for electromagnetic waves. The orthodoxy today is that light is both wave and particle, depending on the measurement. That’s “absurd,” Fekri says. Light is entirely a wave, and Schroedinger described it correctly. Like waves in water or air, waves of light need a medium to be wavy in. That medium is the ether.
The first half of the book is a review of scientific history that tried to understand light. Fekri quotes from sources including Democritus, Newton, Descartes, Huygens, Fresnel and Maxwell to show the development of wave theory and then the systematic (almost conspiratorial, he suggests) suppression of it in favor of particle theory after Newton. The current wave-particle duality, he says is an unstable compromise.
Fekri re-examines the famous Michelson-Morely (MM) experiment that supposedly proved there is no ether. He argues that they did not actually show that. The luminiferous ether “sticks” to surfaces, just as the Earth’s atmosphere sticks to the Earth. MM did not find evidence of ether because they were “in” it. Ether cannot be detected on Earth because it is unchanging with respect any Earthly laboratory’s frame of reference.
What about the moon, though? The Apollo 15 astronauts left a mirror behind. Laser beams shot from Earth to that mirror are reflected back, but not to the exact spot geometry says they should be. They are offset by a small amount that could be the result of the ether wind. Other experiments using clock drift in GPS satellites in orthogonal orbits show differences by amounts predicted by ether drift. Fekri doesn’t cover such experiments but does consider stellar aberration.
Fekri does a reasonable job of re-explaining all sorts of particle findings in terms of wave theory, including the double-slit experiment, the photoelectric effect, and even the famous measurement of gravitational lensing by Eddington. I don’t have the math to check it all, and the book doesn’t present mathematical arguments anyway, only philosophical, logical, and experimental ones. But from the arguments presented, I became convinced that Fekri could be right. The so-called “measurement problem” in quantum mechanics is actually a second-order error. It is based on a more fundamental error, the wave-particle duality.
The book is definitely a mind-bender, based on plausible assumptions and convincing evidence. I’d like to see some attempted refutations of it from members of the orthodoxy.”
Fekri, Majid (2022). What is Light? Troutdale, OR: Plenum, School of Etheric Sciences.
978-1-7775225-1-3, 258 pp.
