Prior to 20th century physics, which established the dominance of Einstein’s special and general theories of relativity, the concept of an all-pervading invisible aether, the medium through which light, gravity and electromagnetism moved, was commonly accepted. Harkening back to ancient alchemy and natural philosophies dominant well before the advent of modern physics, the aether provided a consistent reference frame that explained various observable phenomena. Not measurable, detectable, visible or empirically testable, the aether nonetheless provided a “cosmic constant” that helped to explain the operation of the universe.
Though there are still physicists who believe that some paradoxical observations of the behavior of light particles – such as “entanglement” wherein two particles separated by space and traveling apart at the speed of light continue to exhibit linked behavior, and the increasing acceleration of the galaxies away from each other – are best explained by adopting an aether model, overall the idea of such a universal and ubiquitous medium has been set aside.
Few of us spend our day pondering theoretical particle physics or quantum mechanics, and I expect the scientists among us might dispute my hypothesis: that in the absence of a verifiable aether, we modern human beings have gone ahead and created one, namely the thick soup of human-made electromagnetic fields through which our information age now flows.
Between cell phones, wireless internet, radio, television, short microwave and long-wave transmissions we reside in a ubiquitous, highly energetic electromagnetic field which to all intent and purposes has become our 21st century aether.
To be sure, the natural and celestial electromagnetic fields that surround and suffuse us are larger, more powerful and far older. Their energy generates lightening and the aurora borealis and they deflect the most dangerous radiation of the sun around our planet, helping to preserve the atmosphere upon which we depend. Our 21st century technologically created aether is comprised of a carefully tuned collection of frequencies that have been subject to greater and greater refinement as technology has improved. We are now able to split and separate distinct frequencies with great discrimination, which is why we can all use our cell phones at the same time, and broadcast and receive information on myriad frequencies simultaneously. The waves of data emanating from our little blue planet swirl unimpeded beyond our atmosphere – an aetheric, ever-expanding information bubble in space.
So here’s the irony: for centuries people believed in the existence of aether, abandoned reliance on it about one hundred years ago, and then having concluded it does not exist, have now created a new version of it. Just as God was declared dead in the 70s only to be followed by a resurgence of religious faith across the globe in the 90s, so has the aether been rechristened as the wireless internet and world-wide web. From telephones to refrigerators, all and everything is quickly being suffused within the modern aether, sharing in its powers of transmission and blurring the past distinctions between private and public space.
The new aether, like the old, is impartial to politics and opinion, carries all data within it equally, has no qualities of its own, and in that sense is completely pure. When technology advances to the point that human beings can directly uplink their own consciousness through the aether, what happens next is anybody’s guess.
