The ancestors of the medium

Before quantum mechanics took hold, a line of thinkers the paper calls mechanical realists sought the reason behind physical laws. They believed the universe must be intelligible and grounded in the logic of a medium.

RSI presents the Eternal Consonance as the modern successor to the Luminiferous Aether, the light-carrying medium of nineteenth-century physics. James Clerk Maxwell pictured his equations as the stresses and strains of a physical substrate. Lord Kelvin proposed the Vortex Atom, in which matter is a stable knot in a universal fluid. Their work hinted that light, magnetism, and matter are forms of one continuous substance.

In the 1920s, the paper argues, Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg put mathematical utility ahead of physical intuition and silenced this tradition. Albert Einstein resisted a "dice-playing" God and sought a Unified Field Theory. Nikola Tesla rejected curved space, holding that only the medium filling space has properties. Lacking tools to model complex fluids, they could not supply proofs.