TLDR: Actually the aether was never debunked. Light and all other physical phenomena are waves or fields, and a field is a property that has to belong to something rather than nothing, so there must be a medium everywhere that carries them. The Michelson-Morley experiment only failed to detect an ether wind because Lorentz already explained the null result with length contraction caused by motion through the ether, years before Einstein. Physicists preferred Einstein’s version because it need...

Jesse Michels

@AlchemyAmerican · Mar 22

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Einstein admitted publicly that "the ether" was not incompatible with General Relativity towards the end of his career https://t.co/ky5E71xtcB [Quoted] Einstein tried to bring back the aether! Most people think Michelson-Morley (1887) ended the debate but i only ruled out a static luminiferous aether, not all models. In his 1920 Leiden lecture, Einstein argued that general relativity requires space itself to have physical https://t.co/sl7zwbWqap