Lenard’s Ether and Its Vortex of Emotions

This chapter traces the career of Philipp Lenard, a prominent scientific figure in Nazi Germany, as a way of understanding some of the specifically German conceptions of the ether in the twentieth century. Starting from the perspective of Anglo-Saxon observers, the chapter sketches the development of Lenard’s understanding of the ether through his experience with the ether, the experiments he envisaged to prove the ether, and his emotions concerning the ether, as these impacted his scientific, philosophical and political approaches. The chapter also discusses his major scientific and popular writings from between 1910 and 1943, highlighting the exchange of ideas about the ether, particularly between German and British scientists, and delineating Lenard’s aims in the natural sciences as well as in political matters related to ether, matter, life and spirit, which became a central part of his Deutsche Physik, an infamous physics textbook from 1936.

Ether and Aesthetics in the Dialogue between Relativists and Their Critics in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries

This chapter pairs a study of ether and aesthetics in exploring dialogues between relativists and critics in two different periods. In the 1880s, Ernst Mach argued against absolute time and space but also offered new perspectives on aesthetic phenomena and speculated on a gravitational ether. In 1905, Albert Einstein announced the superfluity of the luminiferous ether, but by 1918 had described space without the ether as ‘unthinkable’. Responding to his friend H. A. Lorentz and critics Ernst Gehrke and Philipp Lenard, Einstein both used the literary form of a dialogue between a relativist and a critic and defined a new gravitational ether that might have disarmed criticism. Neither strategy was successful, however, and the chapter concludes with an examination of social and aesthetic dimensions of the environment of political debate, commercial publishing and disciplinary discussions that marked the emergence of relativity in the public sphere in the post-war period.