People invented the aether because all waves we see with our eyes need a medium. This is a very sound intuition, and in fact some people maintain that we can view spacetime itself as a type of medium for propagation of waves physicists study. In some sense the aether is “wrong,” but in another sense, the approach behind it is right—you use intuition with the familiar to guide your search and comprehension of weird stuff Nature throws at you.
People invented the aether because all waves we see with our eyes need a medium. This is a very sound intuition, and in fact some people maintain that we can view spacetime itself as a type of medium for propagation of waves physicists study. In some sense the aether is “wrong,” but in another sense, the approach behind it is right—you use intuition with the familiar to guide your search and comprehension of weird stuff Nature throws at you.