Lie #1 – There is no Aether
Of all the lies told by physicists none has been so damaging as the lie “there is no aether.” Since the beginning of scientific endeavor scientists had always assumed that there was aether in space, a medium for the transmission of light and forces. Unfortunately ill-conceived experiments such as the one by Michelson and Morley cast doubt on the aether models of that time. That doubt was to take hold at the very time when Max Planck came up with a more proper explanation for aether, beginning the modern era of aether now referred to as vacuum fluctuations and zero-point energy. Even Einstein jumped in before he became a full-fledged aether denier, by co-inventing the name zero-point energy (nullpunktsenergie) in a paper he co-author with Otto Stern.
The only equation by which the observed phenomena are satisfactorily accounted for is that of Planck, and it seems necessary to imagine that, for short waves, the connecting link between matter and ether is formed, not by free electrons, but by a different kind of particles, like Planck’s resonators, to which, for some reason, the theorem of equipartition does not apply. Probably these particles must be such that their vibrations and the effects produced by them cannot be appropriately described by means of the ordinary equations of the theory of electrons; some new assumption, like Planck’s hypothesis of finite elements of energy will have to be made. Hendrick Lorentz from a 1906 lecture at Columbia University.
What should have been a turning point for physics, an era of real understanding of the nature of the vacuum, became a nightmare when vacuum fluctuation deniers squashed those ideas and ultimately dominated physics for more than a century. Without the physical medium of the vacuum to rely on they had to fabricate all manner of fanciful and incorrect theories to explain how light and forces are transmitted through space.
Even today while many physicists are now realizing that the denial of the existence of aether was indeed a lie, they have not yet come to terms with all the damage it caused and what it will take to fix that damage.
From my blog: http://www.physicsheretic.com