In some Eastern philosophies, the concept of "nothingness" is characterized by an egoless state of being in which one fully realizes one's own small part in the cosmos. The Kyoto School handles the concept of nothingness as well. Taoism Laozi and Zhuangzi were both conscious that language is powerless in the face of the ultimate. In Taoist philosophy, however real this world is, its main characteristic is impermanence, whereas the Tao has a permanence that cannot be described, predetermined, or named. In this way the Tao is different from any thing that can be named. It is nonexistence, in other words, nothing. Taoists also have the related concept of wu wei. Science Despite the proven existence of vacuum, scientists through the 17th to 19th centuries thought there must be a medium pervading all space that allowed the transmission of light or gravity. Thus, in this period, it was not accepted that complete nothing was possible. Theories describing such a medium are collectively known as aether theories, so named as an evocation of the aether, the classical element from Greek philosophy. In particular, the medium that is supposed to allow the transmission of light is called the luminiferous aether. This became the centre of attention after James Clerk Maxwell proposed that light was an electromagnetic wave in 1865. Early aether theories include those of Robert Hooke (1665) and Christiaan Huygens (1690). Newton also had an aether theory, but to Newton, it was not the medium of transmission since he theorised light was composed of "corpuscles" which moved by simple mechanical motion. He needed the aether instead to explain refraction. Early theories generally proposed a mechanical medium of some sort, allowing the possibility of the same medium supporting both light and gravity. Proof that light has a wave nature, rather than Newton's corpuscles, was provided by Thomas Young in his 1803 interference experiment, seemingly confirming the need for an aether. The most well known attempt to detect the existence of the aether was conducted by Albert A. Michelson in an experiment of 1881, later repeated with Edward W. Morley in 1887 with more precision. This failed to show the desired effect, but reluctant to abandon the aether theory, various attempts where made to modify it to account for the Michelson-Morley result. Finally, Albert Einstein, building on the work of Hendrik Lorentz, published his theory of special relativity in 1905 which dispenses entirely