A highly volatile, flammable liquid used as an anesthetic or solvent. In physics, the hypothetical medium once thought to fill all space.
From Greek 'aithēr' meaning 'upper air' or 'pure air', believed by ancients to be the substance that filled the heavens above the terrestrial sphere. The chemical compound was named for its volatility, seeming to disappear into air.
The famous Michelson-Morley experiment in 1887 disproved the existence of the 'luminiferous ether' that physicists thought light traveled through, paving the way for Einstein's theory of relativity. Meanwhile, diethyl ether revolutionized surgery as the first widely-used general anesthetic.
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