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The only aether which has survived is that which was invented by Huygens to explain the propagation of light. By the early 20th century, aether theory was in trouble. A series of increasingly complex experiments had been carried out in the late 19th century to try to detect the motion of the Earth through the aether, and had failed to do so. A ...
In the 19th century, luminiferous aether (or ether), meaning light-bearing aether, was a theorized medium for the propagation of light. James Clerk Maxwell developed a model to explain electric and magnetic phenomena using the aether, a model that led to what are now called Maxwell's equations and the understanding that light is an ...
It seems that if the aether drag hypothesis were true then stellar aberration would not occur because the light would be travelling in the aether which would be moving along with the telescope. Consider a bucket on a train about to enter a tunnel, and a drop of water drips from the tunnel entrance into the bucket at the very center.
And referring to the Fizeau experiment, he even wrote: "The aether is all but in our grasp." He also said the aether is necessary to harmonize Lorentz's theory with Newton's third law. Even in 1912 in a paper called "The Quantum Theory", Poincaré ten times used the word "aether", and described light as "luminous vibrations of the aether". [A 19]
Maxwell's original equations are based on the idea that light travels through a sea of molecular vortices known as the "luminiferous aether", and that the speed of light has to be respective to the reference frame of this aether. Measurements designed to measure the speed of the Earth through the aether conflicted with this notion, though. [c]
A 1933 portrait of E. T. Whittaker by Arthur Trevor Haddon. The book was originally written in the period immediately following the publication of Einstein's Annus Mirabilis papers and several years following the early work of Max Planck; it was a transitional period for physics, where special relativity and old quantum theory were gaining traction.
If the Earth is traveling through an aether medium, a light beam traveling parallel to the flow of that aether will take longer to reflect back and forth than would a beam traveling perpendicular to the aether, because the increase in elapsed time from traveling against the aether wind is more than the time saved by traveling with the aether wind.
According to ancient and medieval science, aether (/ ˈ iː θ ər /, alternative spellings include æther, aither, and ether), also known as the fifth element or quintessence, is the material that fills the region of the universe beyond the terrestrial sphere. [1]