Category: Aether holdouts

The list below is believed complete, though membership – like everything here – is subject to revision.

• The Aetheric Concord – Dr. Aird's 1855 society for proving the flat plane – the exact mirror of the Bavarian Society, and never once known to disagree.
• Dr. Ambrose Aird – Victorian gentleman-amateur (1809–1884) who revived Lorimer's abandoned method to prove the flat plane, and fitted it with a correction that could not fail.
• Maurice Allais – Nobel economist (1911–2010) who spent fifty-eight years on a pendulum and defended another man's data against the explanation that later took his own.
• The Auk – Prominent member of the Aetheric Concord remembered, all the same, by a single public moment: asked a simple question, he answered at great length and did not arrive at an answer.
• Josiah Grimble – Irritable founder & secretary of the Aetheric Concord (1799–1872), who admitted only those who agreed and consigned objections “to the midden.”
• Hendrik Lorentz – Dutch physicist (1853–1928) who tried to save the aether by letting moving bodies contract – and supplied the transformations Einstein used to abolish it.
• Dayton Miller – Eminent American physicist (1866–1941) who spent thirty years detecting an aether drift later reassigned, in full, to the temperature of his hut.
• Ezekiel Quartz – Aetheric theorist (1828–1887), the Aetheric Concord's self-styled Defender of the Aether, who reduced all of physics to one medium and dared the world to refute him.
• Lucian Sheen – The self-styled 'contrary advocate' who insisted he was a man of the globe and, across twenty years, only ever argued the plane.
• Nikola Tesla – Serbian-American inventor (1856–1943) of the alternating-current world, and the last great holdout for the luminiferous aether, who called relativity 'a mass of error.'

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