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Star Traveler from Angelbert Metoyer's Dark Energy Splitting the Universe . Click to enlarge.At the end of the 19th Century century many physicists were still searching for the luminiferous aether - the mysterious, invisible substance that permeated the universe - the medium that (it was presumed) needed to exist in order to support light waves.
At that time, waves were understood to be mechanical disturbances in a medium - in effect, shapes that propagate through the medium transporting energy from source to receiver with a speed dependant on the medium itself . Water waves, waves on a string, sound waves in a column of air - all of these phenomena relied on matter to support these moving shapes.
The Aether was supposed to be the invisible stuff that somehow oscillated as the shapes of light waves passed from point A to point B. It had to be really odd stuff - invisible, for one thing, and also incredibly resilient, because it had to support an unbelievable speed - the speed of light.
Nevertheless, by this point the mechanical qualities of the aether had become more and more magical: it had to be a fluid in order to fill space, but one that was millions of times more rigid than steel in order to support the high frequencies of light waves. It also had to be massless and without viscosity, otherwise it would visibly affect the orbits of planets. Additionally it appeared it had to be completely transparent, non-dispersive, incompressible, and continuous at a very small scale. (wikipedia)
In other words, aether couldn't be seen, weighed, touched or tasted, but it was stronger than anything known to man. And it was everywhere - in your shoes, hair, mouth, nose, and subway tunnels. A really strange thing for physicists to believe in.
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