the ether / aether
lorenetworkingops culture
The imaginary medium light was once thought to travel through, and the wink in the name Ethernet.
Nineteenth-century physics assumed waves needed a medium, so it posited the luminiferous aether filling all space; the Michelson-Morley experiment of 1887 famously failed to detect it, and relativity later dispensed with it entirely. When Metcalfe and Boggs named their 1973 network Ethernet, the joke was deliberate: the shared coaxial cable was the omnipresent medium every station transmitted into, a working ether for packets even though physics had abandoned the real one. Engineers still say a lost packet vanished into the ether, and the pun is the whole point.
Also known as: aether, luminiferous aether, the ether