The biggest laughing stock in physics may yet have the last laugh. The hunt is now on to see if it really is out there. For another, it could explain away dark energy. This movement could not be explained by the gravitational. The point at which Mercury has its closest approach to the Sun, its perihelion, moves.

In the third in particular he used general relativity to explain the precession of the perihelion of Mercury. For one team, the aether is a dead ringer for dark matter. In his four papers, published in November 1915, Einstein laid the foundation of the theory. Then, in late 2018, two independent groups suggested that the similarity between the aether and the shadowy powers that populate our cosmos may not be mere coincidence. Since the early 2000s, a small group of researchers have claimed that this invisible, space-filling substance could have the power to unify physics. In an astonishing twist of fate, the key to relativity’s salvation could lie in the aether. Einstein’s universe is also plagued by dark forces that his theory cannot cast out. Its failure to explain the behaviour of the universe at the smallest scales suggests that some more fundamental theory is waiting to take its place. The aether, if it gets mentioned at all, is an embarrassing footnote in its rise to glory.īut relativity has run into difficulties of its own. It is a byword for human achievement and scientific progress. Today, relativity offers us our best picture of the large-scale structure of the universe. Few victories in modern physics have been so total. Over a century ago, it picked a fight with Einstein’s theory of relativity and lost. AS FAR as dead ideas go, the luminiferous aether is among the deadest.

Theory of relativity by einstein