Now, keep in mind that light acts like a wave and also as particles (photons or light quanta), but never at the same time. While a wave needs a medium to travel through, particles don't. Originally, people thought that light was a wave, and it worked out great in mathematical calculations, but how would it travel through space if there is no medium? That's why people thought that there was "ether" in space, which was conjectured by the Greeks. Finally, they proved that light, radio waves, IR waves, UV waves, and visible light acted as waves and also as particles. I would recommend that everyone on AAC reads "The Story of Science" by Joy Hakim! It's a great book!

 

For further reading and lots of references - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maxwell's_equations

 

To answer your question, yes i do believe in Aether.

 

Why?......

 

As Whittaker ("A history of theories of ether and electricity") and others have
pointed out, the aether is still with us, only now it's been renamed the
vacuum. The point behind that comment is that what goes under the name
of "vacuum" in quantum field theory is not a vacuum in the usual sense of
empty space because it's populated with virtual particle pairs, has energy
density, maybe even gravitational mass density (if the cosmological constant
turns out not to be zero), can be polarized, etc.. This sort of entity is
conceptually much closer to what nineteenth century physicists called ether,
so it might be good to revive the use of that term.

Of course, there are significant differences between this new ether and the
old one. Most importantly, back in their day, Tait, Kelvin, Maxwell et al.
used non-relativistic mechanics to describe how the ether works, which led
to prediction of ether drag, which disagreed with the Michaelson-Morley
experiment. However, now that we've upgraded to relativistic mechanics,
the problem with ether drag has been resolved, so that is no longer an
obstacle to the existence of ether.