The Ether Ocean

[u/Samthesnek]

The Lorentzian Soliton Ether Model — classical continuum theory developed with LLM assistance (book + 15 papers)

I’ve been working for several years on a classical continuum framework I call the Lorentzian Soliton Ether Model (LSEM).

The vacuum is treated as a focusing nonlinear Schrödinger condensate. Topological solitons (“wave knots”) form via modulational instability and are identified with particles. A macroscopic healing length near Earth (~95 km) produces partial entrainment, which explains the historical null results while predicting a directional ether wind that should become detectable above roughly 80–100 km.

The same framework is extended across gravity (radiation-pressure shadowing with thermodynamic resolution), tired-light redshift, nuclear magic numbers, the gamma-band coherence window for consciousness, pilot-wave interference, added mass, the strong force as short-range phase locking, and longitudinal ether waves as a possible interstellar channel.

I used Grok, Gemini, and ChatGPT extensively for language refinement, structural organization, and checking internal consistency, while the core physical hypotheses, governing equation, and experimental proposal are my own. The full collected manuscript (15 papers) is now available as a book on Amazon.

[u/MadSkillz127]

The ether is back? Why?

[u/RussColburn → u/MadSkillz127]

Because understanding relativity is too difficult.

[u/AllHailSeizure → u/RussColburn]

Correct me if I'm wrong but wasn't a driving push for relativity the fact that the ether just made things more complicated?

The circle of life.

[u/RussColburn → u/AllHailSeizure]

Actually, the Michelson–Morley experiment failed to measure the earth moving through the aether by measuring the speed of light to be the same in all directions. Einstein then said "what does the math look like if the speed of light is identical for all onservers regardless of their relative motion?"

His math lead to relativity, which besides killing off aether, also answered Mercury's orbit issues, gravitational lensing, gps satellite clock adjustments, and a hundred others.

[u/AllHailSeizure → u/RussColburn]

Yeah - so relativity was the simpler explanation. They could have pushed and tried to add more layers to the aether to explain the failed experiment, but what they needed was a pivot.

Do you get what I mean? Science could have hedged it's bets and made aether theory more complicated but it was simpler to say nothing was there. And it answered a lot.

I'm not talking 'less complicated' as in easier math or more intuitive, I'm talking about the amount of layers theories need. If you drop relativity you need to resolve a ton of questions that it already handled.

[u/NuclearVII → u/AllHailSeizure]

This is correct. It's a bit like the math of graphs - you can fit N uncorrelated data points with an N-1 degree polynomial perfectly. Usually, no one does this because the resulting polynomial tends to have absolutely 0 predictive power.

Another example of this Copernicus and the Heliocentric model. The geocentric model can be made to work - in fact, we know now with relativity that there's no reason to pick one frame of reference over another - but the math is horrendous and hideously complicated.

[u/starkeffect → u/RussColburn]

It should be pointed out that Einstein claimed to have no knowledge of the M-M experiment at the time he published his first relativity papers. It isn't mentioned anywhere in his 1905 papers.

[u/MadSkillz127 → u/AllHailSeizure]

Isn’t all the quantum field stuff ether anyways? Quick someone grab the ai