The aether is a well respected assumption in the natural philosophers toolbox for building working models of our experiences. Everybody accepted it until the Michelson–Morely experiments cast doubt on it. Instead of burying the results and carrying on regardless, which science is very good at doing, some theoretical physicists decided to ditch the aether. Don Hotson in his 3 articles on the subject of Dirac explains the emotional climate of the scientists at the time. Dirac had virtually restored the " aether " by his formulation, so they searched long and hard to find a way to bury it again.
Einstein valued the aether as did Bohr. The only way Einstein could save the aether concept was to replace it with spacetime. Because it was a so called Mathematical concept, Einstein was able to get it past the gatekeepers! Few , including Einstein, understood the new mathematical models of electric and magnetic phenomena. The Maxwell vortex model , a mechanical model, was mystifying. However the European theoreticians were impressed enough to really study it. Everyone else politely ignored it. Einstein therefore had an advantage the further west he travelled. He could introduce Maxwells ideas to a new audience in his own showboating style! He could rename the vortices in the aether as spacetime! Nobody was clued up enough to realise what he had done in America. Of course back in Europe they still preferred the aether " tool".Tto further obscure what he was doing Einstein travelled back to Europe to Study Under Levi and Ricci so he could formulate his ideas in the most obscure form called Tensor terminology.
Today more and more trained physicists can run through the mathematical hoops of relativity theory and come up with various exact solutions. The value in being able to do this however is not great because these solutions, rather than guaranteeing instant fame and fortune result in some nasty brickbats from other theoretical physicists. It is not the solution it is the reputation that carries sway. Unless you are a " superstar" like Feynman for example , nobody listens.
The fear that this nastiness and mudslinging generates is very real. The propaganda about how science works is a myth as good as the ancient myths but less intelligible! Science is supposed to be a collaborative effort to uncover the " truth" is the propaganda. The reality is it is another mechanism for extracting as Much technological and financial advantage for the few through exploiting the many.
The aether became a useful tool in America and Britain in particular to persecute a certain group of European immigrants. If you do not know how these terms were used to separate out Nazi sympathisers from the Allies you have a lot to learn of how the propaganda and spy war was fought. It worked on both sides of the war. Those who deigned to use the notion of spacetime in Nazi Germany were "Jewish sympathisers!".
The legacy of those days has hardly passed and is the cause for such bitter and vitriolic reaction to those who put forward any type of Aether theory.
However philosophically we have to grow up and understand the modeling we do requires a medium. The name is not important, what is important is to recognise that no one, not even a god can bring something out of nothing. The belief that this is possible is one of the fundamental screw ups introduced in the philosophical theosophical debates of the pre Kantian Era. Of course, I do not deny anyone there right to believe what they want, but as a cultural consensus it is amazing that large sections of society subscribe to this viewpoint without ever challenging it. The very act of thinking about it screws ones mental processing up in painful ways making it possible for one to be manipulated to accept any incongruent and contradictory idea laid before you! On the other hand, accepting that nothing can come from nothing liberates the mind into a truly inquisitive search.
Few even realise that the concept of god creating "ex nihilo" is a relatively modern one accepted in a relatively minuscule part of human culture but propagandised by force of empire on large portions of the continents of the earth. Even worse, those who propagandised it rarely believed it themselves! It was an argument to defeat those who claimed there god was greater, to shut them up by claiming what all acknowledged as an impossibility!
The safeguard for sanity is the fractal paradigm, the scale free almost self similarity of form and action. There are no absolutes, absolutely! Rather there are unending exhausting processes which we willingly cease to carry out declaring " Absolutely no more!" In such a scenario, absolutes are always a choice of faith not factual impossibility. Both myth and fact are creations of the human intellect. The best we can ever do is pragmatic impossibility, and that is always a shifting ground.
Yes it is an aether, or a spacetime or a set of Lagrangian constraints. The purpose is to provide the modelling "clay" to shape a descriptive model of what is observed or hypothesised. Why I like Leedskalnin is he sets it out in a simplistic way to give profound insight. In much the same way Faraday set out his experiments for all to read. I have never read Faradays work. Maxwell had and he spent years thinking about it. Look what he came up with! Ed read widely and in scientific journals but he claims that he spent about 2 years in experimentation in his Rock Gate sculpture garden home. His theoretical model, at a time when the atomic bomb was still top secret stuff, is quite insightful. It showed that any body who takes the time can come up with a reasonable working model. It was only after the war that electromagnetic theory was introduced to the broader public. It is only now that plasma physics is being made more publicly available. Ed saw all the essentials in his 2 years of experimentation, enough to put forward an electromagnetic theory rather than the stratified electric theory.
We must not believe the propaganda. When radar came out during the war it was highly classified. Radio waves were aether effects when they were first discovered and utilised. There was no clear electromagnetic theory despite Maxwells best efforts! Ed proposed one in public while governments were funding military research into it in secret. The age of big money linked to scientific reputation was just beginning. The time when suspicion and ruthlessness was incorporated in the scientific elite was just beginning fuelled by national security concerns, and the problems of espionage. The age of McCarthyism was just beginning
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McCarthyism. This was not just in America, but all across the allied West. People were made to fear discussing their own empirical data in case it lead to persecution. Scientific persecution was rife, and still is. Feynmann discussed how the "New Boys" we're bullied into shape in his college fraternity. This kind of rough housing was laughed off, but it was serious. Many Americans were put in concentration camps because of their Japanese ethnicity.
It is fashionable to gloss over these things and not to see the historical perspective. The present nastiness and suspicion in online physics forums is an outgrowth of these sentiments. Those that come through it wear it as a badge of honour rather than the disgraceful besmirching of science that it is. Ah but it was ever thus!
