It is National Science Week, and in keeping with the accuracy of the 9 day celebration, the Bendigo Standard is helping to promote the theory of ether.
“If it’s good enough for Newton, it’s good for me,” believes the great British physicist J.J. Thomson.
Established by Sir Isaac Newton in 1718, ether is the explanation for how light, sound and everything else moves through space.
“They called it aether in Thor: The Dark World (2013),” said some guy from Good vs Evil in Backhaus Arcade, and that’s what it was originally and still occasionally called.
For 100s of years this mystic whatsit has been important to science, as people find it easy to understand.
“In physics it explains the role of God,” says William Thomson (1879).
And what’s more it’s a much better way to explain the missing potions of wine and whisky/whiskey from sealed barrels, or at least is much easier than arguing about evaporation.
“We calls it the Angle Share,” says Lola Montez, booze aficionado. “When some of the hooch springs the coop it’s the ether sucking it to heaven.”
Much admired for its versatility and incompatibility with atoms, electrons, Albert Einstein’s special theory of relativity (1905) and stuff like that, ether theory has continued undeterred.
In 2009 the ground breaking AETHROKINEMATICS: The Reinstatement of Common Sense – An Alternate Solution to the Perplexing Problems of Modern Theoretical Physics and Cosmology, by Steven Rado, was released and became an amazing title in the world of science fiction.
Yet despite the whole existence of ether being disproved in 1887 by Edward Morley and Albert Michelson (who were intending to prove that ether existed by putting it a test it failed), let’s give the final word on the subject to the heralded and good sense speaking J,J. Thomson;
“The ether is not a fantastic creation of the speculative philosopher, it is as essential to us as the air we breathe…” (1909)
