this post was submitted on 27 Sep 2023
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Aether was a fudge and pretty sure Einstein knew it. Forgot the exact history, but it was made up from whole cloth to make the math work out.
Well yeah. The concensus at the time was that light is a wave, and waves need a medium to travel through, so they just made up some stuff that must be everywhere and called it the aether. The null result of the interferometer experiment is part of what led to the discovery that light is a particle that acts like a wave, and so doesn't need a medium.
The medium for the electromagnetic field is space time
A mistake plus kelevin gets you home by seven.
Dark energy is a fudge in a similar way. Eventually we'll know what it actually is and no longer need it, kinda like alchemy was to chemistry.