Some ideas have the power to persist well past their expiration date, with our modern political climate you will no doubt have seen evidence of this. Ideas have a way of living on long after their propagators, be it theirs or another’s. Such too was the idea of the Aether.
A supposedly universal, all-encompassing in which all other elements, even the heavenly bodies in the sky, exist. Counted among Aristotle’s most notable additions to the theory of matter, he was insistent upon it despite the lack of evidence for his ‘Aether’. Still this idea survived until the twentieth century assuming a different form in the guise of a substance that “enabled the movement of light through space called ‘Luminiferous Aether’
Albert Einstein’s theory of light propagation finally laid to rest the Aether of Aristotle, 2000 years later.
