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Luminiferous aether or ether [1] (luminiferous meaning 'light-bearing') was the postulated medium for the propagation of light. [2] It was invoked to explain the ability of the apparently wave -based light to propagate through empty space (a vacuum ), something that waves should not be able to do.
In the 19th century, luminiferous aether (or ether), meaning light-bearing aether, was a theorized medium for the propagation of light. James Clerk Maxwell developed a model to explain electric and magnetic phenomena using the aether, a model that led to what are now called Maxwell's equations and the understanding that light is an ...
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This theory of luminiferous aether would influence the wave theory of light proposed by Christiaan Huygens, in which light traveled in the form of longitudinal waves via an "omnipresent, perfectly elastic medium having zero density, called aether". At the time, it was thought that in order for light to travel through a vacuum, there must have ...
When experiments failed to detect the hypothesized luminiferous aether, physicists conceived explanations for the experiments' failure which preserved the hypothetical aether's existence. The aether drag hypothesis proposed that the luminiferous aether is dragged by or entrained within moving matter. According to one version of this hypothesis ...
The book covers the history of aether theories and the development of electromagnetic theory up to the 20th century. A second, extended and revised, edition consisting of two volumes was released in the early 1950s by Thomas Nelson , expanding the book's scope to include the first quarter of the 20th century.
Physics theories of the 19th century assumed that just as surface water waves must have a supporting substance, i.e., a "medium", to move across (in this case water), and audible sound requires a medium to transmit its wave motions (such as air or water), so light must also require a medium, the "luminiferous aether", to transmit its wave ...
The Lorentz ether theory, which was developed mainly between 1892 and 1906 by Lorentz and Poincaré, was based on the aether theory of Augustin-Jean Fresnel, Maxwell's equations and the electron theory of Rudolf Clausius. [B 1] Lorentz's 1895 paper rejected the aether drift theories, and refused to express assumptions about the nature of the ...