Aether, does it exist or not?

Question

try it with my spelling corrected. Maybe the answers will be more focused.

well, you guys say no :-( I guessed it did because a force must force the laws of nature to exist and all matter to behave accordingly. I guessed maybe it was through a medium like Aether. It seems logical to me. Even if every little piece of matter has it’s on little program something must make the program function.

If mass warps space then what did it warp? Space?

Answer 1

Nope. Aether/Ether is just the theoretical goop that the planets float through.

It's an ancient greek anachronism that became a 1400s scientific anachronism that became an 1800s scientific anachronism as we learned about electromagnetic waves.

Answer 2

No. People once assumed the need for this fantastical magic stuff called aether. But Albert Michelson surprised himself by essentially discovering it doesn't exist, and physicists for the last 100 years have understood it was never needed in the first place.

So we don't need it in theory, and we don't find it in practice.

Aether has joined alchemy and communism in the ash heap of bad ideas.

Answer 3

Ether, or luminiferous Ether, was the hypothetical substance through which electromagnetic waves travel. It was proposed by the greek philosopher Aristotle and used by several optical theories as a way to allow propagation of light, which was believed to be impossible in "empty" space.

It was supposed that the ether filled the whole universe and was a stationary frame of reference, which was rigid to electromagnetic waves but completely permeable to matter. Hooke endorsed the idea of the existence of the ether in his work Micrographia (1665), and other several philosophers of the 17th century, including Huygens, did the same. At the time of Maxwell's mathematical studies of electromagnetism, ether was still assumed to be the propagation medium and was imbued with physics properties such as permeability and permittivity.

In 1887, a crucial experiment was performed by Michelson and Edward Morley in an attempt to detect the existence of the ether. The experiment, named the Michelson-Morley experiment in honor of its authors, shocked the scientific community by yielding results which implied the non-existence of ether. This result was later on used by Einstein to refute the existence of the ether and allowed him to develop special relativity without this artificial (and non-existent) constraint.

Answer 4

Nope. The famous Michelson-Morley experiment showed that there was no such thing as ether, and Einstein, using some math from a chap named Lorentz, turned that into the special theory of relativity, for which he should have (but didn't) win a Nobel prize. (He did win a prize for an important contribution to quantum mechanics.)

Answer 5

You'd do better to ask this in Mythology and Folklore.

That's the realm of aether.

It's one of those humor things from Greek medicine, like, black bile, yellow bile, phlogiston, aether, all that stuff.

Their science wasn't the most advanced.

But they were creative!

Answer 6

Note that M & M totally expected to measure the aether.
It was their persistence and the amazing accuracy of their measurements that forced them to conclude that it didn't exist.
This was one of the most important experimental failures in the history of science.

Answer 7

It's where everything that's lost on the internet disappears to.

Answer 8

maybe this is the modern aether?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Higgs_field

Answer 9

no it doesnot