Dmitrii Osenilo
Scientists of the late 19th century tried to build mechanical models [but failed]... The alternative was a strategy that changed the entire 20th century: 'Abandon mechanics and postulate formulas.'
This was done in:
- Theory of Relativity — abandoning the medium altogether.
- Quantum Mechanics — abandoning causal descriptions of the microcosm.
Once they abandoned the very idea of a medium, the problem of describing it vanished automatically. The mathematics was successful — and that was enough to psychologically reject the need for a mechanism... The turn of the 20th century became a time when a new unwritten rule emerged in physics: 'It’s acceptable not to understand what is really happening.'..
This provided enormous freedom:
- Quantum mechanics didn’t require visual models.
- Theory of relativity managed without a medium.
- The probabilistic interpretation allowed one to ignore the mechanical process.
- Mathematics became more important than physical meaning.
This was a departure from materialism towards abstraction — psychologically appealing because it eliminated the need to 'build a model that explains everything.'. But at the same time, it created the possibility to
- Develop theories that contradict familiar causality.
- Construct models that are incompatible with each other.
- Abandon mechanical explanations even where they seemed obvious....
Over the past hundred years, we have acquired tools that were completely unavailable to physicists in the 1900s.. The [old] ether was imagined incorrectly — as a solid abstraction, not as a real, complex gas-dynamic medium"