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The Doomed Hunt for the Luminiferous Aether
For hundreds of years scholars believed in the absolute perfection of the Heavens. Although the Earth could be changed, and therefore corrupted, the heavenly realm of the planets and stars was seen as unchanging and forever incorruptible. These ideas of perfection inspired Aristotle, the Ancient Greek philosopher, to develop an aesthetically pleasing model of the universe in which he proposed that celestial bodies moved in perfect circles around a stationary Earth.
The natural motion of the planets in the night sky did not easily fit with Aristotle’s ideas, as planets were sometimes observed to move backwards, an apparent contradiction of the idea of perfect circular motion. To explain these, and other, difficulties, ancient astronomers developed increasingly elaborate theories of the movements of the planets around the Earth. Aristotle’s simple ideas gradually evolved into complicated theories, but the ideas of perfection that lay at the heart of the Aristotelian Universe were too seductive for scholars to abandon.
The invention of the telescope finally forced astronomers to confront the imperfection of the universe beyond the Earth. Moons were seen around Jupiter, proving that not everything revolved around the Earth, and spots were observed on the Sun, demonstrating for the first time the changing nature of celestial objects. These shocking…
