The Ether of Space

Lead and gold, Sir Oliver Lodge suggests, may be no more than a “filmy gossamer” beside the ether of space. What could fill the heavens so completely—and still pass through every atom?

Writing at the turn of the twentieth century, Lodge takes readers from Newton’s speculations and Maxwell’s physics to the swift waves of light that cross the gulf from sun to Earth. If light is a wave, he argues, it must travel through something; the apparently empty reaches of space cannot be empty after all. Lodge sets out to make the ether’s unseen properties—its elasticity, motion and extraordinary pervasiveness—intelligible, while admitting that its constitution remains a puzzle and that doubt is reasonable. Is this invisible medium merely a useful idea, or the most substantial thing in the universe?

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