Скачать или смотреть The Ancient Aether Concept: From Quintessence to Modern Understanding

The idea of aether has evolved dramatically across history. In ancient Greek thought, Aristotle proposed a fifth element—quintessence—to explain the eternal and orderly motion of the heavens. Space, in this view, was not empty but filled with a refined celestial substance.

Centuries later, classical physics reimagined aether as a mechanical medium required for light waves to propagate. When experiments failed to detect such a medium, relativity removed the need for it, and the mechanical aether was abandoned. Space became a structured geometry rather than a material substance.

Yet modern physics still does not describe the vacuum as absolute nothingness. Quantum fields permeate space, and the vacuum possesses measurable properties. This opens a deeper question: could space be physically generated rather than merely geometrically defined?

A modern reinterpretation emerges from studies of nuclear mass defect. In nuclear reactions, a measurable portion of mass appears “missing” and is conventionally described as energy release. However, structural transformations observed in nuclear systems suggest a different possibility: mass defect may involve a transition into an ultra-subtle, diffuse state. Rather than disappearing, it may convert into a space-filling substance.

Because mass defect occurs universally—in stars, radioactive decay, and nuclear reactions—the cumulative effect over cosmic time could produce a pervasive continuum. In this framework, space is not empty but filled with an emergent, extremely subtle medium generated by fundamental matter–energy transformations.

Thus, the ancient intuition of aether finds renewed expression—not as a rigid mechanical carrier of light, but as a modern, physically generated cosmic medium.

Visualizations and conceptual summaries in this video were developed in collaboration with NotebookLM, based on original research from the New Physics Project.