“In honors physics, I learned that Scottish scientist James Clerk Maxwell observed how electrical fields and magnetic fields - both immobile by themselves - would move when combined. They would oscillate, and radiate at fantastic speeds. They would become electromagnetic waves. This was the birth of radio.
Physicist Heinrich Hertz later measured the speed of those waves to be 3.0x10^8 meters per second through a vacuum. Exactly the same as the speed of light. This proved that radio waves were a form of LIGHT invisible to our eyes, just like infrared.

It also proved that light itself was an electromagnetic wave. Such waves differ from mechanical waves, because they don't have to travel through a medium. Electromagnetic waves can travel through the vacuum of space.

But some still believe - as scientists did in the years following the Civil War - that there's a universal, fundamental substance called the "Aether" that undergirds all of existence. And that the Aether is the medium through which electromagnetic waves travel.

As best we know, the Aether does not exist. But to those who believe in it, the Aether doesn't just fill the universe. The Aether IS the universe.

I think I was taken off guard by their asking me questions. Usually there guys reflexively tell me I'm wrong. Or they outright ignore my points (until one of them repeats what I said as if THEY thought of it). My hypothesis is that, wittingly or not, they see minorities as electromagnetic waves. And they see themselves as the medium through which our experiences, our perspectives, our opinions -and even our PRESENCE - propagate. Everything about us is valid only to the extent that THEY are willing to entertain it.

They seem to feel that they're as foundational and as supreme as the Aether.”