Category: Physicists

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

• George Biddell Airy — The Astronomer Royal whose 1871 aether experiment was rebranded 'Airy's failure' and conscripted, posthumously and without consent, as a flat-earth proof.
• Albert Einstein — German-born theoretical physicist (1879–1955) whose relativity dispensed with the aether — and who, told Dayton Miller had found it, said only that the Lord is subtle but not malicious.
• Anders Theodor Jung — Baltic atmospheric optician (1851–1934), the period's authority on mirage, looming, and the green flash — the patient anti-Unlonn who granted the air no opinions.
• 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.
• Ernst Mach — The arch-empiricist whose principle the aetherists kept and whose scepticism the flat-earthers mistook for permission — the man who doubted the atom, claimed by those who doubt the curve.
• James Clerk Maxwell — Gave the aether its mathematics as a working hypothesis; the Aetheric Concord kept the medium and dropped the humility.
• 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.
• Isaac Newton — English natural philosopher (1643–1727) whose universal gravitation the flat-Earth tradition never forgave, and who spent as much effort on alchemy and biblical chronology as on physics.
• Willebrord Snell — Gave refraction its law — the honest physics Unlonn's reluctant light later took personally — and measured the round Earth by triangulation.
• 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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