chess211

I said that Einstein said an ether doesn't exist and that electromagnetic waves propagate through empty space but the fact that you must assign properties to this 'empty space' implies that it is something rather than 'empty space'. Nothing by definition can only have 1 properties and that is that is has no properties. Infact nothing is an abstract form of thought and has no relation to reality.

What 'empty space' means in this instance, is that an electromagnetic wave does not need to interact with anything except itself to propagate. The aether was a creation due to trying to find a parallel between sound waves and electromagnetic waves. Sound waves exist because a medium is vibrating giving rise to the sound wave, the sound is a property of the motion, and not of the material. So people tried to find the aether, the material that vibrated which is what electromagnetic radiation was. Nothing was found, and so Einstein decided that the solution would be to adopt full Lorentzian invariants for mechanical systems instead of trying to impose Galilean invariance on Electromagnetism which required the aether.

Properties to not need to be assigned to space for electromagnetic waves to fluctuate, the 'permeability of free space' and other similar constants are probably what you are referring to as the properties assigned to free space, but those are properties of the theory itself. The only properties that are assigned to space for the theory to work, is that space is a 4-dimensional Riemannian Manifold, which is just specifying what 'space-time' means. Everything else it understanding how the theory couples with itself in the absence of any other coupling terms.

You've missed the point. I am not trying to argue that there is infact longitudinal waves existing in a 'vacuum'. I am saying that we must always go back and look for contradictions between new and old theory. The fact that most cite that longitudinal electromagnetic waves cannot (in a vacuum) exist because there are no charge carriers in a vacuum I've shown to be unfounded. Now that doesn't mean that there isn't evidence from another theory to say they cannot exist, it just means you cannot use that argument.

Well, the first point I made was that there are no charge carriers in a vacuum, which is true by definition. An electromagnetic wave is a force carrier, but it is not a charge carrier. In quantum theory an electromagnetic wave is equivalent to the photon as a particle, and as I stated earlier the photon does not have any charge, so in a vacuum there are no charge carrier to interact with the wave. So I am still confused as how you have shown that charge carriers exist in the vacuum, could you clarify that point?

What we look for in contrasting old and new theories, at least ones with any predictive value at any level, side by side is 'what limit is the old a good approximation?' 'How divergent are the theories at certain energies, times, distances?' 'What new phenomena are predicted by the new theory that are impossible in the old?'

A recent study, http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/dem/summary/v047/47.3.rosenfeld.html, if you can read it. If not there is a summery located here, http://www.futurity....chool-success/.

Basically, the point it that accounting for other factors such as wealth and education level of parents, there is no statistical difference between the academic performance of a child raised by a heterosexual couple, and a child raised by a homosexual couple. Both groups perform better then children from a single parents household, and all perform significantly better than a group living home. So in the interest of benefitting children, at least academically it is in their best interests to be adopted by a couple, either homosexual or heterosexual, it does not make a difference, compared to any other living situation.