h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Ether is also a medium thought to permeate space and fill the interstices between particles of matter, it is the medium through which electromagnetic waves pass through. OK so you are so smart now and think it no longer exist, but I ask you where do you think the debrie was dumped when they built the hyperspace bypass through earth? That's what is meant by "the crackles in the ether" when your correspondent reports from far flung corners of the universe.

Ether description is good enough for me - sorry I couldn't resist that!

organic ether actually smells sweet and a bit sickly.

Ether is a great way to set your car on fire on a cold winter morning; when you're late for work and words like "judicious" and "moderate" have lost their meaning.

if you must put your car to sleep
Diethyl ether
Diethyl ether is a colourless, highly volatile liquid with a characteristic smell. In air it forms a mixture which burns with a blue flame; in oxygen-enriched mixtures, it forms an explosive combination. In air, the flammability range of ether is 1.9—48% but in oxygen the range is 2.0—82%.
Characteristically, because ether is denser than air, ether vapour pools on the floor of the anaesthetic room and if ignited forms a blue flame which may cause an explosion if it reaches a rich source of oxygen.
Diethyl ether is manufactured by heating a mixture of ethyl alcohol and sulphuric acid to 1300C in a still with a constant flow of alcohol. The resulting vapour contains a mixture of ether, alcohol and water. Any dioxide is removed by sodium hydroxide and the ether and alcohol are separated by fractionation. Ether is dried using calcium chloride, and distilled.

I started to read this thread just because I thought that it was about the 'ether' which would let light propagate through a vaccuum. But not it is about some silly chemical that was used and abused about 100 years ago (and probably stil is used and abused these days).

Anyway, I do like your explaination of the ether, maybe there is some hope left for stupid physics.

I misread it entirely. I thought it was about Esther.

If ether didn't exist, how could you have a sub-ether waveband? Remember, where the Guide is inaccurate, it is at least *definitively* inaccurate

I preferred the picture
Garabaldi, Gidday.
I thought you speciality was Sheep-in-politics?
I decided to check out this topic as it was listed as "most neglected", but not so.

Don't know about Esther..........but I know of esters, a group of related organic gaseous compounds that smells sweet, really brillant smell, a bit like plastic bubble gums and flowers...... but better. It doesn't do anything to the human brain and therefore thankfully unabused.