Ether and Modernity offers a snapshot of the status of an epistemic object, the "ether" (or "aether"), in the early twentieth century. The contributed papers show that the ether was often regarded as one of the objects of modernity, hand in hand with the electron, radioactivity or X-rays, and not simply as the stubborn residue of an old-fashioned, long-discarded science. The prestige and authority of scientists and popularisers like Oliver Lodge and Arthur Eddington in Britain, Phillip Lenard in Germany or Dayton C. Miller in the USA was instrumental in the preservation, defence or even re-emergence of the ether in the 1920s. Moreover, the consolidation of wireless communications and radio broadcasting, indeed a very modern technology, brought the ether into audiences that would otherwise never have heard about such an esoteric entity. The ether also played a pivotal role among some artists in the early twentieth century: the values of modernism found in the complexities and contradictions of modern physics, such as wireless action or wave-particle puzzles, a fertile ground for the development of new artistic languages; in literature as much as in the pictorial and performing arts. Essays on the intellectual foundations of Umberto Boccioni's art, the linguistic techniques of Lodge, and Ernst Mach's considerations on aesthetics and physics witness to the imbricate relationship between the ether and modernism. Last but not least, the ether played a fundamental part in the resurgence of modern spiritualism in the aftermath of the Great War. This book examines the complex array of meanings, strategies and milieus that enabled the ether to remain an active part in scientific and cultural debates well into the 1930s, but not beyond. This portrait may be easily regarded as the swan song of an epistemic object that was soon to fade away as shown by Paul Dirac's unsuccessful attempt to resuscitate some kind of aether in 1951, with which this book finishes.

A quasi-religious corporation worth mentioning is the Fabretto Foundation, based in Nicaragua. This Foundation is a true God Enterprise. Father Rafael Mara Fabretto was an Italian priest who moved to Nicaragua with the purpose of opening and managing an orphanage . . . It was a catastrophic failure. Father Fabrettos experiment almost killed me, together with other kids who were rescued at the brink of starvation. Ironically, it was Anastasio Somoza (the father, the first member of the Somoza dynasty) who saved our lives . . . The continuum works in marvelous ways; just picture a hated, soft-hearted tyrant being impacted by the sight of more than 300 children starving to death. I bet his conscience screamed to his inner ears that he was going to be blamed if some of those children were to die . . . Somoza was moved by the continuum to do what is atypical of dictators, an act of love. The author, Manuel S. Marin, as a child, lived for a short time in the Oratorio San Juan Bosco, where he met Father Rafael Mara Fabretto, who lighted up in him the notion of the continuum, for which he didnt have a name until he met Bob Jones at Williams Brothers Construction Co.