= Luminiferous aether
{wiki}
Can you just imagine what if <luminiferous aether> was one single fixed rigid body? This is apparently what <Maxwell> believed, <Subtle is the Lord by Abraham Pais (1982)> page 111 quoting his entry to Encyclopedia Britannica:
\Q[There can be no doubt that the interplanetary and interstellar spaces are not empty but are occupied by a material substance or body, which is certainly the largest, and probably the most uniform, body of which we have any knowledge.]
Then it would provide a natural space coordinate for the entire universe!
Apparently <Einstein> was the first to completely say: let's just screw this aether thing completely then, it's getting too complicated, and we don't really need it. As Wikipedia puts it well, in very unencyclopedic tonehttps://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Luminiferous_aether&oldid=1063821642{ref}: Aether fell to <Occam's razor>.