Idea of the ether comes goes comes

In Newtonian physics, mass is an intrinsic quantity of objects and there is an ether, an omnipresent space-filling field, to account for the motion of light. Relativity rejects the ether and one of the implications is that nearly all the mass of objects (atoms) is an emergent quantity that arises from the kinetic energies of the constituent particles. There is some residual mass of the constituent particles themselves (quarks, electrons), but >95% of the mass of atoms is from their kinetic energy. We are pretty sure that this small mass of the constituents is not due to the internal motions of yet smaller particles. Our best answer for how this small residual mass arises is that there is an ether, an omnipresent space-filling field, to account for the mass of the fundamental particle (Higgs field).

This is a great irony of physics.