It certainly depends on a belief in the waviness of light—if light were particulate, it could just go blasting through empty space with no need for any Æther to carry it.
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Vanderjuice hits upon one of the greatest oddities in physics: the wave-particle duality. We now know light goes blasting through empty space. But it still acts like a wave in so many other regards. I don't know anything about physics (except how to strike a pool ball a certain way to get it to go where I want!) and even less about quantum physics. Maybe quantum physics explains this odd duality better, where something acts like a particle on Tuesday and then a wave on Thursday. But it seems to me there must be a third thing that is both somehow and we're all just too stupid to come up with an satisfying equation for it. It's probably because you can only understand the properties of the warticle when observing it from a higher dimension. Like in a balloon. Man, I sure miss the easy reading of the Chums of Chance chapters!
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