Redefining Reality - The Intellectual Implications of Modern Science

Scientists thought that the physical world was made up of two
categories of forces. Motion and gravitation were covered by
Newton’s theory. Electricity, magnetism, and light were explained
by four equations named for the Scottish physicist James
Clerk Maxwell.
These equations discuss the relation between changing and
unchanging electrical and magnetic charges. When the amount
Put these laws together, and you get the equation that governs
the behavior of light, which has the form of a wave equation.
Thus, light was thought to be an electromagnetic wave.
Add to this the various ways that light adds, subtracts, and
interferes with light from other sources, and physicists were
sure that light was a wave of electromagnetic energy.
But waves need something to do the waving. Sound, for example, is
made up of waves in air. Without air, there is no sound. We get light
from stars across vast regions of seemingly empty space. This must
can carry the electromagnetic waves. This something was called
the light-bearing, or “luminiferous,” aether. Finding evidence of it
became a major task for physicists in the 19 th century.
The aether had to exist not only because waves need a medium, but
because of a strange quirk in Maxwell’s laws: the result that the
speed of light is a constant. If this were true, physicists thought that
it must be constant with respect to something, and that something
was the luminiferous aether.
If the luminiferous aether was just an aspect of Newton’s absolute
absolute rest. Without the aether, there was no reason to believe that
space exists as a real thing in itself, as Newton had held.
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