mountain man wrote:

"Sam Wormley" <swormley1@mchsi.com> wrote in message
news:dzFOe.274637$_o.180950@attbi_s71...

mountain man wrote:

http://www.mountainman.com.au/aether_8.htm

...[trim]...

Some Scientifically Inaccurate Claims Concerning Cosmology and
Relativity
http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/RelWWW/wrong.html#aether

Albert Einstein, in his essay On the Aether (1924), made some
injudicious comments to the effect that relativity theory could be
said
to ascribe physical properties to spacetime itself, and in that
sense,
to involve a kind of "aether".

The above is not the complete picture.
Hilman clearly exhibits injudiciousness
for not painting the complete picture.

I know John Baez wouldn't call Einstein "injudicious"
because it is not a very scientific thing to do, especially
on a web page in his personal .edu.domain that is
devoted to Scientifically Inaccurate Claims.


Einstein's comments were not localised to 1924, but
covered a period which commenced as soon as he
attempted to move from special relativity to his general
relativity, and continued throughout his life.

He could adequately deal with a new type of aether
and in many articles he provided limiting specifications
for this new kind of aether.

In other articles and public addresses, he did not
appear to exhibit the characteristics of a person who
was "injudicious"!

See for yourself, here is an earlier address given
on May 5th, 1920, in the University of Leyden.
http://www.mountainman.com.au/aether_0.html

He clearly did not mean the kind of
"aether" which had been envisioned by Maxwell and others in the
nineteenth century, but his remarks have been seized upon ever since,
by various cranks and other ill-informed persons, as evidence that
"gtr is an aether theory".

He clearly did not mean that the postulate of aether
in physics MUST be banished, Crackpot Patrolman Sam.

Dirac obviously agreed with Einstein in this seeing he
developed a theory from the postulate, published in 1951.

http://www.aip.org/pnu/1993/split/pnu143-4.htm
Number 143 (Story #4), September 9, 1993 by Phillip F. Schewe and Ben
Stein

THE STANDARD MODEL (circa 1993) , consisting of quarks and leptons
interacting via force- carrying bosons, is not the first theory of
everything. Berkeley science historian J.L. Heilbron describes two
others. The Napoleonic standard model (circa 1800), based on the work
of Coulomb, Laplace, Poisson, Ampere, and others, sought to make
physics more like astronomy. According to Heilbron, they especially
liked gravity's straightforward dependence on the inverse square of the
distance between interacting bodies. The primary ingredients in the
Napoleonic model were the electrical fluids (positive and negative),
magnetic fluids (north and south), heat fluid (caloric), light, and the
newly discovered infrared radiation. This model was done in partly by
Fresnel's wave theory of light and Fourier's work on heat. Heilbron's
other example, the Victorian standard model (circa 1890), based on the
work of Maxwell, Lord Kelvin, Joule, Larmor and others, synthesized
electricity, magnetism, and light, and pictured heat as being related
to the motion of molecules. The Victorians were interested in studying
the hypothetical aether continuum, whose mechanical properties could
presumably be compared to those of springs, flywheels, and rubber
bands. But Victorian thinking, like Napoleonic thinking, collapsed when
it outran experimental results. (SLAC Beam Line, Summer 1993.)

to the motion of molecules. The Victorians were interested in studying
the hypothetical aether continuum, whose mechanical properties could
presumably be compared to those of springs, flywheels, and rubber
bands. But Victorian thinking, like Napoleonic thinking, collapsed when
it outran experimental results. (SLAC Beam Line, Summer 1993.)