Atheism and the existence of peanut butter

[polymath257]

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.

Actually, it was a reasonable hypothesis when Maxwell gave his equations in 1861-2. The idea that a wave needed a material to travel through was not an unreasonable one.

I have a physics textbook from the 1880's that describes the aether as the most substantiated idea  at the time. And that is even a correct statement.

That is one reason the Michelson-Morley experiment caught everyone off guard.

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It was a hypothesis, but not a reasonable one.  The mm experiment fully closed the door on the idea, which was important because it had been resistant to every piece of evidence (which was every piece of evidence..literally) which had come before it.  Just using the dates provided, everything required to disprove the hypothesis was known by 1772 (at the latest)...and that it lasted a further century is a demonstration of exactly what I'm mentioning.  In that century (or more), it didn't spin off productive research, it did the opposite of that trying to protect itself.

I'm sympathetic (I think..most of us are sympathetic) to the idea that even when we lose we're winning (when it comes to investigating the universe)...but the la hypothesis-then-theory was never one of those instances.

I think that is a pretty bad misunderstanding of the history. Relatively minor adjustments were required for first order null results. it was the second order results, started by the MM experiment, that ultimately did in the theory of aether. Also, the fact that Maxwell's equations and Newton's equations didn't play well together. The resolution of this by Einstein, Poincare, and others is part of the reason for the dismissal of the LA. Saying it was obvious by 1772 is rather silly since Maxwell's equations were seen as supporting the theory.