The Luminiferous Aether

Lyrics

Before the void was void, I was the medium.
The stillness that all light swam through.
I was the shoreless, frictionless, invisible sea.
The substance of pure propagation.

I filled the space between the worlds. I carried the first starlight to the first eye. I was the assumption, the given, the absolute frame against which the planets measured their rush. I was the answer to the question, how does light travel? I was the fabric that bent but never broke. I was the thing that had to be there.

Then in a basement in Cleveland, in the damp of July 1887, they built a machine to see my face. A sodium flame split into two pale arms, sent to race along my currents. They were searching for the aether wind, the drag of the earth moving through my body. Midnight came. The streetcars stopped. They watched for the fringe to shift.

But the light came home at the same time. Always. North, south, east, west. No current. No drag. No whisper of my presence. The apparatus was perfect. It only measured my perfect absence.

A slow doubt settled. A fine crack in the foundation. For years, they tried to explain the stillness. And then a young man in 1905 wrote me out of the story with a pen stroke. I did not die in a fire. I was not murdered. I simply began to evanesce from the equations. A scaffolding removed from a finished building.

I was the thought that filled all space, until a better thought arrived. Now I am a ghost in the physics, a name in a dusty book. But you are hearing this. The sound travels from a speaker to your ear. What does it travel through? For this one moment, sing the space. I am the medium again.