It’s extremely weird the way the ether idea comes back.
Michelson-Morley pretty definitively sank the idea, but the notion itself floats around. As a ‘cool-looking rock’ aficionado, I often talk to hippies who explain wave-functions mean they need to get high. I smile and nod. But they do mention that wavefunctions are everywhere and in all places. Um, yeah but no. The idea, that there is a substrata everywhere, permeating everything, has endured beyond Michelson-Morley.
Even religions often mention this idea with God being omnipresent. If you’re a scientist, you want a scientific thing everywhere. And you want to test it. If you’re a popular science enthusiast, you want popsci everywhere, and you want it to mean you should smoke a bowl. If you’re a religious figure, you want God everywhere, and you want to believe it. People tend to find what they’re looking for.
Right now, there’s an odd little idea floating around that Electric Fields exhibit some fluid properties. That doesn’t mean EF are physical fluids, but they do exhibit some odd behaviors. You can’t scoop them up or anything. But mathematically, if you do CFM on EF, the numbers you get are weird. What’s more, some forms of EF are seemingly everywhere. The best example is the cosmic background radiation, which is observable pretty much everywhere.
I’m being a little loose here with electric fields vs magnetic fields. Thinking on paper, as it were. But the idea that something ineffable and omnipresent exists is oddly ineffable and omnipresent itself.