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Updated: June 7, 2025
Nothing, for example, could be really more profound than the difference between waves of compression and rarefaction transmitted through the luminiferous ether and the translation of their impact into light.
The outcome of it all is, that we now have experimental demonstration, as well as theoretical reason for believing, that the ether, once considered as only luminiferous, is concerned in all electric and magnetic phenomena, and that waves set up in it by electro-magnetic actions are capable of being reflected, refracted, polarized, and twisted, in the same way as ordinary light-waves can be, and that the laws of optics are applicable to both.
If the luminiferous ether did not resist the sun's influence, it could not be wrought into those undulations wherein light consists; if the air did not resist the vibrations of a resonant object, and strive to preserve its own form, the sound-waves could not be created and propagated: if the tympanum did not resist these waves, it would not transmit their suggestion to the brain; if any given object does not resist the sun's rays, in other words, reflect them, it will not be visible; neither can the eye mediate between any object and the brain save by a like opposing of rays on the part of the retina.
Could you see the luminiferous ether, you would also find every individual particle making a small excursion to and fro; but here the motion, like that assigned to the water-particles above referred to, would be across the line of propagation. The vibrations of the air are longitudinal, those of the ether transversal.
In seeking, for the purpose of this research, a fluid medium which shall possess analogous properties to the luminiferous ether, or whatever may be the medium whose vibrations render manifest certain physical phenomena, it might be considered at first sight that substances so dense as glycerin and sirup could have but little in common with the ether, and that an analogy between experiments made within it and phenomena associated with ethereal vibrations would be of a very feeble description: but Professor Bjerknes has shown that the chief requisite in such a medium is that its viscosity should be great, not absolutely, but large only in proportion to its density, and if the density be small, the necessary viscosity may be small also.
The prevailing hypothesis of a luminiferous ether, in other respects not without analogy to that of Descartes, is not in its own nature entirely cut off from the possibility of direct evidence in its favor.
"Professor Silliman, of Yale, discovered over twenty years ago, that the ether could be differentiated into the luminiferous, or light ether, and the sonoriferous, or sound ether. "Other great scientists since then have found a third ether the heat ether. "Their discoveries show that the atmospheric etheric envelope of each etheric atom is made up of etheric atoms of different vibratory powers.
At the perfectly invisible focus where these effects are produced, the air may be as cold as ice. Air, as already stated, does not absorb radiant heat, and is therefore not warmed by it. Nothing could more forcibly illustrate the isolation, if I may use the term, of the luminiferous ether from the air.
Physicists tell us that this material, known as the luminiferous ether, permeates the universe, and by its vibrations transmits movements which affect the eye, giving rise to the sensation of light, and the perception of even the most distant objects. Our eyes are so constructed as to respond to the vibrations of this medium for the transmission of light. The Eye.
Sir John Herschel very beautifully suggests, that the comet's tail, during this wonderful perihelion passage, resembled a negative shadow cast beyond the comet, rather than a substantial body; a momentary impression made upon the luminiferous ether where the solar influence was in temporary obscuration.
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