• Question: is the ether a real think or do you believe that the ether exists

    Asked by anon-227008 to William, Thibaut "Tibo", Harry, Georgia, Emily, Aimee on 9 Nov 2019.
    • Photo: Harry Wilkinson

      Harry Wilkinson answered on 9 Nov 2019:

      I don’t personally.

      If I remember rightly old scientists came up with the idea of the aether to come up with an explanation for how light travels but since then we’ve come up with better models that can explain everything we see in that sense.

    • Photo: Georgia Orton

      Georgia Orton answered on 11 Nov 2019:

      I think that this word originalally comes from ancient/medieval science to describe stuff that we can’t see – something called aether was thought to fill all the empty space.
      As Harry said, I think physicists used to think that light was transported by ‘aether’ but we now know that this isn’t the case.
      This is a good example of how science works: we come up with theories and then we try to prove them wrong. If we can’t prove them wrong then they’re probably quite good. Theories have to be updated to fit with new discoveries and information.

    • Photo: Aimee Egglestone

      Aimee Egglestone answered on 12 Nov 2019: last edited 12 Nov 2019 7:30 pm

      Aether and Flogisten are the two greatest annoyances I have with alchemy era “science”! The history and logic behind them are incredibly interesting, though! So it is definitely worth reading up on.

      Modern Ethers on the other hand are very useful molecules and make great solvents!

    • Photo: Emily Sparkes

      Emily Sparkes answered on 18 Nov 2019:

      In all honesty I’ve never given the aether much thought, but it’s an interesting piece of scientific history. I use ethers such as diethyl ether on a regular basis though, and definitely believe they exist!

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