What kind of Medium did people think it is ,from Democritus to Einstein and Hawkins?

Question

Was the Idea feasible?

The medium of the Aether that is.
That medium or any other medium
what ever they thought?

Answer 1

Hi goring

Th Aether used to have all sorts of magical properties. It gained some semblance of scientific properties in the latter part of the last millenium after Maxwell and others convinced the establishment that light was not corpuscular (a la Newton) but rather composed of waves. The question became: if it is a wave, what is waving? The Aether came to be the medium which light waves travelled through. It had the properties required to meet what we understood about light. At the end of the nineteenth century Michelson and Morley undertook an experiment to detect the velocity of the earth relative to the Aether by comparing perpendicular light beams in an interferometer. The result they got is one of the most famous null results of all time: they found no velocity relative to the Aether in any direction, as if the Aether didn't exist.

This result prompted Lorentz and Fitzgerald to come up with the length contraction formula which bears their names. This contraction was incorporated into Einstein's special relativity, and that theory consigned the Aether to the dustbin. Surprisingly there are still people today who think there's an Aether. The problem is that today's Aether must also explain all of the experimental support for relativity, so it is in fact experimentally indistinguishable from having no Aether at all. That makes it a magic chicken, and as everyone knows magic chickens are of no use to science.


Hope this helps!
The Chicken

Answer 2

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