Eather equal to spacetime?

[quark69]

TL;DR

I’m wondering if the thought of the eather from early physics is equal to the the spacetime we now today?

None, just a thought

 

[Ibix]

No, it was supposed to be a material filling all of space. Like a gas, basically.

Experiment chipped away at the properties it could have until we were left with the Lorentz ether that has no properties except its existence. This version of the ether is simply special relativity with an undetectable (even in principle) ether that doesn't actually do anything, so it got dropped as a concept.

 

[.Scott]

The basic principle behind the theory of ether was that there was such a thing as "absolute 0 velocity" - and that the speed of light was relative to that speed. So, if the sun was motionless, with Earth orbiting it, then we should see light apparently moving faster when Earth was moving "down stream" and slower when we were moving "upstream".

But no such difference could be found. Several possible "fixes" were theorized in an attempt to explain this.
Then Einstein introduced Special Relativity which eliminated this absolute reference (the ether).