Essay Review: Aether Studies: Nineteenth Century Aether Theories,the Ethereal Aether: A History of the Michelson-Morley-Miller Aether Drift Experiments,1880–1930

Tricker R. A. R. , The contributions of Faraday and Maxwell to electrical science (Oxford, 1966).

Kilmister C. W. , Special theory of relativity (Oxford, 1970).

Whittaker Edmund , A history of the theories of aether and electricity: The classical theories (2nd edn, London, 1951).

Ibid., 142–5. Schaffner quotes Whittaker at length on pages 59–60. Here and in many other places, Schaffner omits page numbers in references to works from which he quotes. Another frustrating practice is his omission of article titles in his bibliography.

Truesdell C. , Essays in the history of mechanics (Berlin, 1968), in “Foreword”, unpaginated.

C. Truesdell, Review of Hankins Thomas L. , Jean d'Alembert: Science and enlightenment, Centaurus, xvi (1971), 58–59.

These terms are hardly self-explanatory. According to the “stagnant” aether theory, the aether remained at rest, i.e. stagnant, as material bodies moved through it. However, some aether was supposed to be entrapped within optical bodies and to move with them. The combination of a stagnant aether and some entrapped aether produced the appearance that a moving optical body “dragged” aether within it at a portion of its own speed. This was the drag investigated by Michelson and Morley's 1886 experiment. Another kind of “drag” was thought by some to arise from a friction-like interaction between the aether and the earth's surface, resulting in a non-stagnant aether, i.e. one which near the earth moved with the earth. This could mean that the aether at the earth's surface was at rest with respect to the earth's surface, thus explaining the 1881 and 1887 experiments.

Swenson does consider other aspects of social history of science, but not in a thorough way. The relationship between scientists' concepts of nature and popular concepts of nature is involved, for instance, in his mention of the lunatic fringe's opposition to relativity (pp. 202–3). Also, the problem of the organization and pace of scientific research, independent of the ideas involved, is reflected, for example, in his mention of the influence of World War I on research activity (pp. 172–3).