"What I worry about," Roswell at last, "is that the Æther will turn out to be something like God. If we can explain everything we want to explain without it, then why keep it?"
* * * * * * * * * *
Hmm. I think I've already covered this whole God slowly disappearing as an answer to our understanding of the universe as we learn more and more about how it all works scientifically. Sorry that I got there before you, Roswell, and ruined your paranoid revelation. Although, why worry about it at all? If God isn't needed, He isn't needed! Discard that Trash!
This line of reasoning, by the way, is precisely what happened to Æther. By the time somebody (Hendrik Lorentz, I believe?) had come up with a theory of Æther that mostly worked with our understanding of light's movement through space (and all that matter moving through the Æther as well (also magnetic waves!)), Einstein had come up with special relativity which explained everything similarly to Lorentz' theory but without the need for Æther. So, you know, why keep it? Einstein basically stated that he didn't kill Æther, really. His theory just took away any need for a physical thing that filled space; he just assigned all the attributes that affected light and other bodies in the universe to space itself. You know, allowing space and time to be curved and altered itself by the things inside of it.
Once again, my clumsy understanding of all this isn't even close to a rigorous, academic understanding of how it all works. But I think I've got some of the concepts figured out in a murky, Vaseline-smeared understanding of them.
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