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S.B. Karavashkin

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the light waves propagation, and the strengths of electric and magnetic fields was identified with the ether mechanical stress. The mechanical ether hypothesis met great difficulties, in particular, the impossibility of the light waves transverseness (requiring from the ether to have the properties of absolutely solid body) and the absence of the ether resistance to the celestial motions. In the contemporary view, this hypothesis is absolutely bankrupt, because the forces of elasticity, strain etc. have themselves the electromagnetic nature. The difficulty of mechanical interpretation of the ether led in the end of 19^th century to abandon the mechanical models of ether. The only item remained unsolved - the ether participation in the bodies motion. The difficulties and contradictions arisen with it were solved by Relativity which lifted the question of ether motion". "Beginning with that moment and forever, the ether as a substance (! - S.K.) disappears from the theory. The EM field takes its place as a mathematical category offering to describe conveniently the processes occurring in the matter and the correlation between their characteristics" [5, p.219].

In other words, there exist bodies, particles or, as they are often named, weighty matter, but the interaction between them is a convenient mathematical category and nothing else. It means, if one appeared in a strong EM field and was shocked by a step discharge,

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this was only a mathematical fiction (or you can read it as an Evil Spirit, because the irreality and non-materiality could influence on you only by some preternatural force).

"They say, the matter has disappeared, and they wish to make gnosiological conclusions. But we ask, has the mind retained? If it has not, if it has disappeared with the disappearing matter, if with the disappearing brain and nervous system the ideas and senses disappeared too, then, consequently, everything has disappeared, and your reasoning has disappeared as a sample of whatever "thought" (or thoughtlessness)! If so, if with the matter disappearing the mind (idea, sensation etc.) is supposed non-disappeared, it means that you secretly passed to the viewpoint of philosophical idealism. Just this always happens with the people who wish, for "economy", to mean the motion without matter, because they surreptitiously, just simply proceeding from their reasoning, accept the mind existing after the matter disappearing" [1, p.251].

Having read this analysis, the relativists may declare that Max Born was the ardent supporter of Mach and his philosophical appraisements are incorrect; that the relativity gets on fine with the matter space and specifically with the matter out of weighty bodies. Only in this case the matter is named the field and, according to Landau, has some specific properties:

"The between-the-particles interaction may be described by means of a force field. Instead saying that one particle acts on another one, we can say that it produces a field

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around itself; each particle in this field is under some force influence. In the classical mechanics a field is only one of a few ways to describe the phenomenon of particles interaction. But in Relativity, thanks to the finiteness of an interaction propagation velocity, the situation essentially changes. The forces acting on a particle at present moment are not determined by their instant disposition. Any particle displacement acts on the others only in some time interval. It means that the field itself becomes the physical reality. We cannot speak about the direct interaction of particles distanced from each other. The interaction can occur at each moment only between the neighbouring points of a space (the short-range). So we have to say that one particle interacts with the field and of the following interaction of the field with another particle" [6, p.64].

If not going carefully into some shades of this quotation, in particular that the short-range interaction concept was misappropriated by the Relativity (perhaps Landau has forgotten that Galilee, Bradley, Doppler, Hertz, Maxwell were not the relativists) and noting that there was not said directly of the force field as a mathematical category and, the more, the interaction between the field per se and a particle in this field is declared, one can suppose that a field is a material substance characterising the distant bodies interaction. Then the question is pertinent, will the field disappear as a material substance if there appeared