Research Seminar May 8th: Jaume Navarro (University of the Basque Country) - Connecting Matter and Spirit

Connecting Matter and Spirits. The Many Faces of the Ether in Early Twentieth-Century Physics

Contrary to the received view among physicists, historians of science commonly

agree that the results of Michelson and Morley with the interferometer did not

act as an experimentum crucis to reject a notion of the ether at the end of the

nineteenth century. But few scholars have actually delved on the role the ether

had among physicists, engineers, and popularisers in the early twentieth-century

and the process by which this epistemic object was gradually dismissed. In this

paper I intend to present some of the results of an international project called

“Ether and Modernity”, which I am coordinating, so as to show the diversity of

uses of the ether in esoteric and exoteric circles of science, as well as in the

culture of physics at large.

The battleground for the ether in the early twentieth century was wider than the

limited scope of early relativity. The development of quantum theory was also a

field for debates on the ether. At a cultural level, the ether was largely present in

the public sphere through the raise of wireless communications and radio

broadcasting, the popularity of spiritualism, the surge of new philosophical

arguments, or the new literary and artistic forms of modernism. Indeed, the

mysterious, largely undefined ether became a trope in the new pictorial, literary

and cultural experiments of the early twentieth century.

The excessively theory-centeredness of the historiography of physics, with a

disproportionate emphasis on relativity and the quantum theory, gives us only

one face of the picture of the demise of the ether. But there is also a problem with

any history of the ether: the need to define, in actors’ categories, what the ether

actually was. From this point of view, historians find themselves with the

problem of chasing a polysemic term with multiple uses that need to be clarified before a comprehensive history of the decline of the ether may be written.