Word: ethereally
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...century, the prevailing idea was that light is a wave motion, and therefore needs a medium to travel in, as sound waves travel in air. Since light passes unhindered through vacuums, including the vacuum between the stars and the earth, 19th century scientists were driven to postulate a "luminiferous ether." which filled all space. It offered no resistance to the motions of stars or planets, but carried light waves with perfect efficiency...
...Ether Wind. The ether had another useful property: it was presumed to be motionless, and therefore it provided the basic frame of reference from which all motions were measured. A star, for instance, could be said to be moving so many miles per hour through the ether. When the earth swung around its orbit, it moved through the ether too, creating an "ether wind" blowing past...
...Albert A. Michelson and Edward W. Morley tried to measure this ether wind. Their idea was to measure the speed of light (186,000 miles per second) against the speed of the earth's motion on its orbit around the sun (18.5 miles per second). They set up their apparatus, an affair of many mirrors, in a lab in a downtown Cleveland building. Once a day the earth's rotation aligned the apparatus with the earth's path around the sun. If there were an ether wind, the light flashing across their lab floor should be slowed...
Broadcasting, said he. needs not merely "a traffic policeman of the ether" to regulate frequencies-about all there is now-but supervision to ensure that broadcasters are motivated by what ex-President Hoover called "something more than naked commercial selfishness." Holders of station licenses, said Rogers, are "trustees for the public," and what he thought of some trustees was made abundantly clear by his review of the quiz scandals...