Luminiferous Aether

Disproved · 1818

Status: Disproved
Year: 1818

Summary

If light is a wave, something must be waving — so space was filled with an invisible, frictionless, rigid medium. Michelson and Morley looked for the Earth's motion through it in 1887 and found precisely nothing.

Equations

Wave Equation Lorentz Transformations

Proponent

Hendrik Lorentz Augustin-Jean Fresnel

Referenced by

equation

Lorentz Transformations Wave Equation

researcher

Augustin-Jean Fresnel Hendrik Lorentz

Open on the Theories shelf — the interactive card, the filters, and everything alongside it.

From the Theories database in Notion, last edited 2026-08-15. This page is the row, rendered by the build; nothing on it is written by hand.