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Updated: May 7, 2025
Not less startling is it to be told that a question may yet be raised which will challenge "the conception of a luminiferous aether, which for half a century has dominated physical science.
Obviously such fancies are purely of mythologic parentage. Now the luminiferous ether, upon which our authors make such extensive demands, may be physically "ethereal" enough, in spite of the enormous elasticity which leads Professor Jevons to characterize it as "adamantine"; but most assuredly we have not the slightest reason for speaking of it as "immaterial" or "spiritual."
Now we call all these things matter, and embrace all matter in one general definition; but in spite of this, there can be no two ideas more essentially distinct than that which we attach to a metal, and that which we attach to the luminiferous ether. When we reach the latter, we feel an almost irresistible inclination to class it with spirit, or with nihility.
The possible complicity of the luminiferous ether in magnetic phenomena was certainly in his thoughts.
The theory of the luminiferous ether as the medium of the transmission of light is one of these pretentious bridges of words. Our advancing knowledge of electro-magnetic phenomena may some day drive us back to a modified form of the corpuscular theory of light, and then we can throw this of the ether to the winds.
"I see you're surprised at my knowing your language. You're a very inferior race of animals don't even understand telepathy, don't understand the luminiferous ether, or the relation between time and space. Your greatest things, such as the Skylark and your object-compass, are merely toys."
P. Can you give me no more precise idea of what you term the unparticled matter? V. The matters of which man is cognizant, escape the senses in gradation. We have, for example, a metal, a piece of wood, a drop of water, the atmosphere, a gas, caloric, electricity, the luminiferous ether.
These mental dispositions in M. Comte account for his not having found or sought a logical criterion of proof; but they are scarcely consistent with his inveterate hostility to the hypothesis of the luminiferous ether, which certainly gratifies our "predilection for order and harmony," not to say our "besoin d'idéalite", in no ordinary degree.
The luminiferous ether surrounds and is influenced by the ultimate particles of matter. The symmetry of the one involves that of the other. Thus, if the molecules of a crystal be perfectly symmetrical round any line through the crystal, we may safely conclude that a ray will pass along this line as through ordinary glass. It will not be doubly refracted.
This theory also called the theory of the stationary luminiferous ether moreover found a strong support in an experiment which is also of fundamental importance in the special theory of relativity, the experiment of Fizeau, from which one was obliged to infer that the luminiferous ether does not take part in the movements of bodies.
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