Luminiferous aether

Light Box - Carlo Bernardini

In the late 19th century, luminiferous aether or ether, meaning light-bearing aether, was the term used to describe a medium for the propagation of light. In fact, it was believed that light could propagate in vacuum. The luminiferous aether had to be something extremely porous, because the light propagates in the smallests paces known.

The key difficulty with the aether hypothesis arose from the juxtaposition of the two well-established theories of Newtonian dynamics and Maxwell's electromagnetism.

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