In this essay I ask whether the question of the aether is done and dusted, as mainstream physics has considered it so for over a century, or whether there is a chance for resurrection after the discovery of the Higgs boson, and hence indirectly, the Higgs field which can be interpreted as an aether of sorts. I pose the question “what if one of the postulates of special relativity has been misunderstood and misrepresented?” and try to answer it in light of modern understanding the motion of the Earth through space, with respect to aberration, relativity’s time dilation and length contraction, and variability in the speed of light in various optical dielectric mediums relative to inertial frames of reference. I conclude the essay with notes on how Einstein himself thought about the aether throughout his life.
Marts Liena