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 a 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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