(October 25, 2021 at 4:56 pm)The Grand Nudger Wrote: There was never any evidence for a lumineferous aether, there were never any good arguments to believe as much based on what we did know, and nothing about us holding on to that idea helped - completely the opposite. That was, purely and succinctly, a demonstration of the power of institutional thinking. There may be good examples of us getting things wrong for effect, but that probably isn't one of them. It's just another word for witches.
The Luminiferous Aether was a reasonable hypothesis in 1690. It was too bad no-one actually tested it until the Michelson-Morley experiment in 1887.