aether
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θərBased on the Random House Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2013.
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| an arrangement of five objects, as trees, in a square or rectangle, one at each corner and one in the middle. |
| an extraordinary or unusual thing, person, or event; an exceptional example or instance. |
aether
in physics, a theoretical, universal substance believed during the 19th century to act as the medium for transmission of electromagnetic waves (e.g., light and X rays) much as sound waves are transmitted by elastic media such as air. The ether was assumed to be weightless, transparent, frictionless, undetectable chemically or physically, and literally permeating all matter and space. The theory met with increasing difficulties as the nature of light and the structure of matter became better understood; it was seriously weakened (1881) by the Michelson-Morley experiment (q.v.), which was designed specifically to detect the motion of the Earth through the ether and which showed that there was no such effect
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