Ether and Aesthetics in the Dialogue between Relativists and Their Critics in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries

Abstract

This chapter pairs a study of ether and aesthetics in exploring dialogues between relativists and critics in two different periods. In the 1880s, Ernst Mach argued against absolute time and space but also offered new perspectives on aesthetic phenomena and speculated on a gravitational ether. In 1905, Albert Einstein announced the superfluity of the luminiferous ether, but by 1918 had described space without the ether as ‘unthinkable’. Responding to his friend H. A. Lorentz and critics Ernst Gehrke and Philipp Lenard, Einstein both used the literary form of a dialogue between a relativist and a critic and defined a new gravitational ether that might have disarmed criticism. Neither strategy was successful, however, and the chapter concludes with an examination of social and aesthetic dimensions of the environment of political debate, commercial publishing and disciplinary discussions that marked the emergence of relativity in the public sphere in the post-war period.