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.
The name Ethernet comes from the luminiferous aether, the medium nineteenth-century physics assumed light needed in order to propagate. The Michelson-Morley experiment failed to detect it in 1887 and relativity eventually dispensed with the idea entirely, leaving a word for something that does not exist.
Metcalfe chose it deliberately and the metaphor is precise. Original Ethernet was a shared coaxial cable that every station could hear, so the cable behaved as a passive medium carrying signals to everyone, exactly the role the aether was invented to play. Collisions happened because two stations could transmit into the same medium at once, which is why the protocol needed detection and backoff at all.
The irony is that modern Ethernet has no shared medium. Switched, full-duplex links mean each station has a private path, collisions do not occur, and the collision detection the name implies is vestigial. The word survived because it names a family of standards and a connector rather than a mechanism, which is a common fate: the technology was replaced underneath the name, and everyone kept saying it because the alternative was renaming everything.
Also known as: aether, luminiferous aether, the ether