The 1920s and 1930s were physics' heroic age. In the lecture halls and seminar rooms of central Europe, a cast of semi-legendary characters — Bohr, Heisenberg, Pauli, Schrödinger et al. — stormed the ...

Received wisdom holds that the notion of an 'aether' — a medium pervading all space, and the material 'substance' of the vacuum, if you will — was permanently relegated to the history books by ...