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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 ...
The energy that a physical body possesses due to its motion, defined as the work needed to accelerate a body of a given mass from rest to its stated velocity. The body continues to maintain this kinetic energy unless its velocity changes. Contrast potential energy. Kirchhoff's circuit laws. Also called Kirchhoff's rules or simply Kirchhoff's laws.
And referring to the Fizeau experiment, he even wrote: "The aether is all but in our grasp." He also said the aether is necessary to harmonize Lorentz's theory with Newton's third law. Even in 1912 in a paper called "The Quantum Theory", Poincaré ten times used the word "aether", and described light as "luminous vibrations of the aether". [A 19]
A history of the theories of aether and electricity : from the age of Descartes to the close of the nineteenth century Author Whittaker, E. T. (Edmund Taylor), 1873-1956
Thomas Young, the first person to use the term "energy" in the modern sense. The word energy derives from the Ancient Greek: ἐνέργεια, romanized: energeia, lit. 'activity, operation', [4] which possibly appears for the first time in the work of Aristotle in the 4th century BC. In contrast to the modern definition, energeia was a ...
In physics the Einstein-aether theory, also called aetheory, is the name coined in 2004 for a modification of general relativity that has a preferred reference frame and hence violates Lorentz invariance. These generally covariant theories describes a spacetime endowed with both a metric and a unit timelike vector field named the aether.
A 1933 portrait of E. T. Whittaker by Arthur Trevor Haddon. The book was originally written in the period immediately following the publication of Einstein's Annus Mirabilis papers and several years following the early work of Max Planck; it was a transitional period for physics, where special relativity and old quantum theory were gaining traction.
The term aether (also written as "ether") was adopted from ancient Greek philosophy and science into Victorian physics (see Luminiferous aether) and utilised by Madame Blavatsky to correspond to akasha, the fifth element (quintessence) of Hindu metaphysics. The Greek word aither derives from an Indo-European root aith- ("burn, shine").