Until 1920 most discussion of electricity and radio was based on the assumption of an ether. Michelson-Morley DIDN’T wipe out the ether. It was wiped much later when quantum quackery took over the doctrines and creeds of “science”.
Here’s a nice clear example from a 1904 book by Frederick Vreeland, the inventor of the weirdly wonderful Vreeland Oscillator which worked in a jelly-like way.
This discrepancy will disappear if we assume, in place of water a semi-solid or jelly-like substance, sufficiently mobile to flow under the influence of gravity, yet with an elasticity which resists any displacement with a continuously increasing force. If now we raise the level at A, the whole surface will slope downward from this point, as shown in Fig. 62, and the pressure due to this raising of the level will diminish rapidly as we proceed from A toward B.
Nature uses jelly to interface with jelly, as seen in the electrostatic radio receivers of mud-dwelling fish.
Each pore is filled with insulating jelly. The jelly makes contact with several hair cells, similar to the hair cells in our cochlea. As the varying charge field passes the face, the jelly expands and contracts in a form of electrostriction, similar to a crystal earphone. (In an insulator, charges don’t move around much. So an incoming positive field charges all the atoms of the insulator positively, which makes them repel each other. The insulator thus expands slightly. An incoming negative field does the same. When the field is zero, the insulator is relatively contracted, not repelling itself.)
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This new research on cochlear cells shows another aspect of God’s design and raises an interesting question.
The cochlea includes two rows of sound-sensing hair cells with opposite purposes.
The inner cells (blue) are pure sensors, input to the brain. The outer cells (yellow) are mixed sensor and muscle, mainly bringing a control signal from the brain and actively wiggling in the jelly to alter the fluid vibrations that are sensed by the inner cells. This action is not fully understood yet, but it seems to focus attention on the most important parts of the signal. The OHCs try to cancel out frequencies that are steady or uninteresting, leaving the frequencies that carry meaning.
The OHCs have two remarkable properties.
The first unique mechanism is the tip-link system:
This tip-link mechanism helps with adaptation to steady sounds. The longest hair is driven directly by the tectorial membrane, and the shorter hairs are controlled by the tip-link. When a signal at this hair’s preferred frequency is new, the tip-links pull the secondary hairs along to emphasize the input to the cell itself. As this frequency continues, the tip-links gradually slide out of the little gate in the longer hair, so the secondary hairs are no longer joining in. After this signal stops, the longer hair reels in and tightens up the tip-link so it can emphasize the next new appearance of its preferred frequency.
The second unique property is extremely fast frequency response, vastly superior to all other muscles or nerves. The OHC can physically vibrate up to 100 KHz, while ordinary muscles can only do about 20 cycles per second.
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This latest research looks at the signal end of the OHC’s fast response, the signals going to and from the brain. It finds a third unique property. Most neural synapses transfer meaning via chemical messengers, releasing little packets of neurotransmitter hormones that serve to excite or inhibit the receiving neuron. In compliance with “scientific” fashion, this is called Quantal Transfer and regarded as the norm. The OHC’s output is analog, transferring the signal by an ion current. This is, of course, called Non-Quantal Transfer, implying heterodoxy. No tenure for you, hair cells!
The big question is not why OHCs use plain old electricity. Many cells communicate this way. Bacteria talk to each other with simple ion currents. This is the default in nature. The question is why other neurons use the indirect and costly and time-consuming chemical packet method.
It’s like using paper mail instead of email. Maybe the reasons are the same.
Secrecy is the purpose of communication. Paper mail is automatically archivable offline, and paper mail is intrinsically harder to tap or listen. A chemical message doesn’t create a field, and thus can’t be monitored from a distance.
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Contra: In fairness, the quantum quacks have given us some useful metaphors. Schrodinger’s Cat represents the magical hall of mirrors created by the rulers. Now you see it, now you don’t, and only the elite tenured scientist is authorized to tell us which is which. Heisenberg is helpful to name the real problem of uncertainty, though there’s nothing quantic about the real problem. Every measuring tool has a fuzzy lower limit of precision, where the measuring tool affects the thing you’re measuring so you can’t tell what’s real and what’s caused by the tool. This is an inevitable part of reality whether you describe reality as particles or waves or wavicles.
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