I have been studying quantum physics and the ideas it presents for a while now.  The one thing that I keep coming back to is that it can’t be that complicated.  While I’ve got a lot of ideas along this line I wanted to take a minute to detail an idea that I just had related to why light travels as a wave and as particles and why it slows down (or appears to around larger objects compared to being in a less gravitational state) in certain conditions.

The first idea is that of light as a wave and a particle concept.  I think light is nothing but a particle and the wave principle that is witnessed, while being real, is in fact nothing more than the movement through a medium just like every other wave does.  The question only becomes what the medium is.  For lack of a better word, we’ll use the centuries old idea of the aether. 

The concept is basically that there is no existence of nothing.  Something exists everywhere.  Just because you can’t see it and can’t measure it, doesn’t eliminate the possibility that it exists.

And to think you could measure it might only make sense if you could somehow remove yourself from its presence which is impossible because I think it is the substance that holds the universe together.  In the end, everything exists inside the aether.

The theory of relativity shows that to measure the aether is quite impossible because as you travel faster and faster or get in a stronger and stronger field of gravity, the things in which you use to see and measure also become effected.  That while you yourself see the 1 meter stick as still being 1 meter, someone looking at you from another point of reference might see it longer or shorter.  This doesn’t mean that you are wrong, or that they are wrong, but that you both have different views of the same situation.

So lets think about this for a second.  If the aether does exist, and light travels through it instead of traveling through nothing, how could this help explain how things shrink or stretch due to your speed or proximity to something large such as the earth.  Well, we know that light travels at a set speed no matter where we find it.  So lets think of light as moving from one particle of aether to another forever.  If we were to relax pressure on the aether and therefore allow it to exist in its natural state, then light, as well as time, would appear to move at a more rapid state, because each progression moves it farther along its way.

Now lets put pressure on it due to large objects moving through it, or speed our space ship up closer to the speed of light where we are placing pressure on the aether around the ship.  In this case the aether is more packed together and one movement of the light actually moves a shorter distance.  Therefore time, the appearance of our meter stick and everything else based on measuring, appears to be closer together or slower.  Its not that they physically are different but everything we base our lives on is the measurement of what we see.  If we exist within certain boundaries then we will always see a meter stick as being 1 meter.  If we take that same stick to another location with less compression or more compression of the aether (more gravity or less) then we will also see the stick as being the same meter in length. However, when looking at things between these two boundries (if this were possible), you would both think something was wrong with the other.

While being in the gravity of the Sun for example:  you might view things going on here on earth as rapidly firing by and visa versa.  Earthlings would see you on the Sun as poking by more slowly than they could bare to watch.  But if asked between you which was right and which was wrong, you would both respond that things were perfectly normal for you both.  Nothing seems off, because nothing is off.  Light and therefore measurement as a whole, just seem to move differently because of the proximity of the physical substance in which light passes through.

So, if you were to be on a space ship speeding along at just under the speed of light, and you turned on a flash light, would you see the light stand still, or would you see it speed away even faster?  And if it sped away, wouldn’t it exceed the speed of light and therefore prove the Theory of Relativity wrong?  Well, if you think about this for a minute, you will quickly realize that when you turn on the flash light inside the ship, you will measure its light as precisely the speed of light.  With no bearing on the speed of your space ship.  Why you ask?  Well, because as we discussed above, the aether is more compact where you exist now.  This means that everything you experience (even though you won’t be able to tell) is closer and more compact.  This includes your measurement devices.  So while the light may indeed physically be moving slower than normal when viewed from another point of reference, you will not see it.  Because it propagates from one aether particle to the next just like normal, there just happens to be more of it in less distance, but when you measure it, it will appear exactly the same as it did on earth.

–glenn hancock