We are eavesdropping on Poe’s quasi-scientific dialogue with a mesmerized patient in his 1844 tale “Mesmeric Revelation.” A lot of history would intervene between this dense, obscure interview about the uninterviewable and, say, Yves Montand and Barbra Streisand cooing across the centuries in the mesmeric musicalOn a Clear Day, You Can See Forever.And it’s a long way from the initial revolutionary impact of the mesmeric rapport to the cheap bedazzlement of hypnotic suggestion, typified in the timeless image of a borscht belt magician proclaiming “you are a chicken” to an obliging volunteer from the audience, who proceeds to...

Of the heady mix of historical transformations in the nineteenth century’s fin de siècle, admittedly the least influential—at least at the time—was an exotic physics experiment conducted in 1881 and 1887 by Albert A. Michelson and Edward W. Morley. In their “etherdrift” experiment, they set out to measure the ethereal wind in which the earth traveled. At the time there was no question as to the ether’s existence; what they were looking for was the quantity of its aerodynamic resistance, if you will. By gauging this resistance with a highly sensitive contraption of Michelson’s making, called an “interferometer,”...

In the intimate parlors and other mystical enclaves of the nineteenth century, mathematical philosophers and poet-madmen tortured distinctions between ether and not-ether, in an attempt to winnow out frivolous immaterialities of the new electric regime from those intangibles that have, since ancient times, enclosed the secrets of angels and the empyrean. For example, we saw that Poe, and later the theosophists, distinguishing between scientifically knowable ethers, such as the luminiferous, and those unknowable and inaccessible to standard human thought, variously charted the infinitely subtle gradations of rarefied matter for the purposes of cosmic understanding. The beginning of the twentieth century...

In what has become a dramatic staple of the outer-space exploration film, a crippled module attempting reentry loses all contact with the earth. “They’re entering ionization blackout,” an anonymous technician will say, less to inform the mission specialists, more as an aside to the audience who might otherwise be baffled. For a few minutes, while listening to dead air, mission control will wait to hear the pilots affirming that they have survived the last trial of the mission. During this interlude, a hot ionized gas forms an envelope around the returning vehicle, effectively blocking transmissions. This ionized gas is the...