Abstract

This contribution is primarily about the transmission of transverse electromagnetic (TEM) waves, our principal source of physical information. Relativity, as its name implies, seeks to describe relationships between entities in various circumstances but doesn't illuminate the nature of those entities, a gap that quantum electrodynamics and particle physics try to fill. A variety of well-observed phenomena, to be outlined below, appear inconsistent with this currently accepted framework of physics. It will be shown that these phenomena indicate the need for a physics framework that admits the occurrence of TEM-wave transmission effects, a factor explicitly denied in the conceptual basis of Special Relativity (SR). To help with these matters, a continuum (aether) theory (CT) of physical nature is outlined in which particles are special, rather (but finitely) concentrated, mainly-rotational forms of disturbance of the continuum. Particle random motions imply random motion of the aether, and this affects the propagation of TEM waves by it. Under this proposal particles are "made" of aether (originally a suggestion of Larmor, 1894), and the Michelson-Morley result is satisfied. The relativity principle, that nothing can exceed the local velocity of TEM waves, will be firmly retained but regarded as only strictly applicable at the smallest scale of physical nature - that of the local aether....