Word: ethers
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...risking a public backlash for the armed raid in which Elian was seized from his Miami relatives. But Elian's obvious joy at the reunion with his father neutralized any political flak, and the congressional hearings Republicans promised within hours of the raid appear to have vanished into the ether. By returning Elian to his father and then letting the courts decide the rest, the White House knocked the wind out of any further protests in Miami or on Capitol Hill. And the fact that Congress could relax the embargo the same week that Elian looks set to go home...
...moved on, with two thirds of the electorate having consistently favored Juan Miguel Gonzalez's right to take his son home and once-angry legislators having quietly allowed plans for a congressional inquiry into the Easter Saturday raid on the Little Havana home to drift off into the ether. The story that had supplanted the death of Princess Diana and stood second only to the O. J. Simpson trial in the extent of network news coverage had all but disappeared from the media over the past six weeks, as Elian and five Cuban playmates romped around estates in Maryland...
...young clerk named Albert Einstein, working in the Swiss Patent Office in Bern, who cut through the ether and solved the speed-of-light problem once and for all. In June 1905 he wrote one of three papers that would establish him as one of the world's leading scientists--and in the process start two conceptual revolutions that changed our understanding of time, space and reality...
...that 1905 paper, Einstein pointed out that because you could not detect whether or not you were moving through the ether, the whole notion of an ether was redundant. Instead, Einstein started from the postulate that the laws of science should appear the same to all freely moving observers. In particular, observers should all measure the same speed for light, no matter how they were moving...
...called because it implies that only relative motion is important. Its beauty and simplicity were convincing to many scientists and philosophers. But there remained a lot of opposition. Einstein had overthrown two of the Absolutes (with a capital A) of 19th century science: Absolute Rest as represented by the ether, and Absolute or Universal Time that all clocks would measure. Did this imply, people asked, that there were no absolute moral standards, that everything was relative...