author
William George Hooper
Best known for a bold early-20th-century attempt to explain gravity through the idea of a universal aether, this writer brought big scientific questions to general readers with confidence and curiosity. His work offers a fascinating snapshot of how people tried to make sense of the physical universe before modern physics took shape.
1 Audiobook
Aether and Gravitation
by William George Hooper
About the author
William George Hooper is known for Aether and Gravitation, published in London by Chapman and Hall in 1903. In that book, he set out to tackle one of the biggest scientific puzzles of his day: the physical cause of gravitation.
The surviving bibliographic record presents him as W. G. Hooper, and editions of the book identify him as William George Hooper, sometimes with the suffix F.S.S. His writing reflects the spirit of a period when thinkers outside the scientific mainstream still engaged seriously with major questions about matter, force, heat, light, electricity, and the nature of space.
Reliable biographical details about his personal life are hard to confirm from the sources available here, so it is safest to remember him chiefly through his work. Today, Aether and Gravitation remains of interest as a historical curiosity from the years just before modern physics overturned the old aether theories.