From the Aether

Spent today's public transit time reading up on the Theory of Relativity. I was looking for lay reactions to the E=MC² equation and it's implications of the uniformity of stuff. I ended up spending way more time reading the lead up section of this wiki page:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_special_relativity

It's pretty fascinating stuff. I never realized how accepted and ingrained the concept of aether was. I guess my reference point for is has always been Victorian mysticism. Reading this article I realized that it was actually an accepted and tested scientific phenomenon. From a modern perspective it seems absurd to believe that there's something which permeates the universe against which we could measure objective speed but reading all the actual work that was done under this assumption it starts to make sense. What's even more interesting is that, from what I can gather, the current theory of relativity may not have been developed without previous work that proved, or assumed, the existence of aether. It's as if this entirely non existent thing was needed as training wheels to get us to the a place where Einstein could develop his theory.