An Overview of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries’ Theories of Light, Ether, and Electromagnetic Waves

Abstract

Johannes Kepler, the seventeenth century celebrated astronomer, considered vision as the effect of its alleged cause—the Lumen. Since many centuries, scientists and philosophers of Light were especially interested in theories and experiments on the cause-effect relationship between our vision and its alleged cause. But the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries’ contributions of Helmholtz, Maxwell, Hertz, and Lorentz, proved that Light was an electromagnetic wavelike phenomenon, which propagated trough space or ether by an exceptionally high velocity. In my paper I analyze some of the reasons that might justify the controversies among the major experts in Physics and Electrodynamics. In 1905 Albert Einstein found that abolishing Ether would remarkably improve his new Special Relativity theory, and Maxwell’s and Hertz’s Electrodynamics. His theory was accepted by a large majority of physicists, Max Planck included, but he also found a ten-year silence on the side of Poincaré, and moderate oppositions from Lorentz, the great expert in classical Electrodynamics.