Abstract

The notion of an aether filling all the space appeared recently as the only one option towards building an intelligible theory of the physical world. A close scrutiny of what the natural philosophers of the past thought about the aether reveals an amazing and febrile quest for an accurate description of this medium. What we find by reading their works anew is not only that the existence of the aether was never questioned, but that the best researchers at the forefront of science struggled to come up with that theory of aether which would best explain the experimental evidence they had. Perplexed by the huge amount of literature dedicated to the aether, we decided to share it with the readership of this journal.