The old foundations of scientific thought are becoming unintelligible. Time, space, matter, material, ether, electricity, mechanism, organism, configuration, structure, pattern, function, all require reinterpretation. What is the sense of talking about a mechanical explanation when you do not know what you mean by mechanics? The paradox is now fully established that the utmost abstractions are the true weapons with which to control our thought of concrete fact.
So said the philosopher Alfred North Whitehead in his Science and the Modern World, 1925. But surely weapons are not needed to control belief in what is true in Nature. Abstraction can surely have no lasting place in science. Physicists have had rather more to assimilate than has been possible and have lapsed a little into a world of abstraction. Whitehead must be wrong. The old foundations of scientific thought were intelligible to their creators. To say that they were becoming unintelligible merely implies developing weaknesses in the minds of later generations of scientists. There was impatience at the difficulties of fathoming and charting that sea of energy permeating space–the aether. And so, many pretended that the aether does not exist and did so by abstract mathematical formulations. History will one day show that they were wrong. In this work we will explore the modern evidence proving that the aether is a reality. We will proceed without mathematics and we will attack abstraction, and, in particular. we will attack Whitehead's problem of understanding mechanics, by explaining the nature of mass.