While Nether as a place was definitely a thing, I never heard of Nether as an object before that. Nether, as an element, did originate with Minecraft so far as I know. Which makes it all terribly unclear but also means you get to choose. In fantasy it can be what other books call mana to do the exact same thing. In farther future flung scifi it can be subspaceish. In Retro-Space opera like the book Polystom, it's just really thin light air so you can fly from Earth to Mars in a biplane. When it isn't a spirit sort of thing, it's usually whatever is convenient to the setting.
It was Plato's fifth element so they figure why not have it be ours. Leaping back the other way, RPGs and Sf/F often use it a substitute for the idea of spirit. The term is etymologically related to Fire as well as Air. You do want to think of it a little bit like the Disney Hercules idea of something that burns the mortality out of you. He was the pure divine air that deities breathed as opposed to the regular air we breath. His children with other primordial deities were things like the Heavens and the Earth and Pride and Forgetfulness and the Titan Atlas and the three Furies. He was one of the primordial deities of Light and the embodiment of the upper sky. And I think there was even some thought that the planets themselves were made of it but don't quote me on that one.īefore that, Aether or Αἰθήρ was a Greek Mythological term. It's natural tendency to move in circles kept the planets in their orbits. It allowed the Planets and Spheres to move through it but it itself did not move much or change. Also called Quintessence it was the quintessential changelessness of the upper sky and that similar eternal changelessness in other more common things. Mostly.īefore Luminiferous Aether it was an Alchemical substance. We just never found any sign of it and eventually came up with wave/particle duality and particles can move through nothing just fine. If there was nothing in space, then there was no way for a wave to move through it, so it couldn't happen, therefore there must be something there. We believed light, as a wave, had to travel through something because that's how waves work. The Scientific version we fiddle around with today came from specifically Luminiferous Aether. Each time a particular theory that uses the idea of Aether loses scientific support, a new theory will grab the word because it is a convenient descriptor for a medium which often seems to be necessary until we figure out a different way of explaining how something might transmit across a distance. Or how waves propagate through the ocean. In the same way that air carried molecules and conducted electricity via ionization for lightning strikes. So before we realized space was a vacuum, Aether was the unobservable substance that allowed particles, energy, and gravity to pass across the space between bodies. The scientific version of Aether is specifically defined as a medium of transmission. Part of the problem is that people use the term because they vaguely know it, know it "isn't real" and it sounds nifty.