"People liked Einstein's theory more for various reasons (good reasons, I think) but aether has never been ruled out in the way, say, phlogiston has been ruled out."
It wasn't ruled out in 1905, but it was as soon as quantum mechanics was invented. We really do know how light works nowadays, and it's very, very definitely not disturbances in some sort of material substance.
"I don't think the fact that all our false theories have been elegant and simple could possibly count as evidence that reality is, in fact, elegant and simple."
Why not? You know that all those "false" theories were accurate up to the seventh or eighth decimal place, right?
"Why would there be something wrong with this?"
Because coupling theories about how the universe works to political factions is a HUGE impediment to discovering the truth. See http://lesswrong.com/lw/gw/politics_is_the_mindkiller/.
"Try jumping off the earth. :-)"
If you don't understand the difference between observing that gravity exists, and observing that there are particles which obey the same laws of quantum mechanics as photons and electrons, which are massless and have spin 2, and are responsible for gravity, you should go back and read some of the earlier stuff on this blog.
"Sure if you don't mind having two totally different and wildly incompatible theories to describe reality."
The whole point is that saying "suppose gravity is transmitted by carrier particles called gravitons" starts off by completely ignoring all of GR, and then tries to patch it up afterwards (with little if any success). Newer theories should supersede older theories, not ignore them.
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- Eliezer Yudkowsky, Collapse Postulates
In the olden days of physics, circa 1900, many prominent physicists believed in a substance known as aether. The principle was simple: Maxwell's equations of electromagnetism had shown that light was a wave, and light followed many of the same equations as sound waves and water waves. However, every other kind of wave- sound waves, water waves, waves in springs- needs some sort of medium for its transmission. A "wave" is not really a physical object; it is just a disturbance of some other substance. For instance, if you throw a rock into a pond, you cannot pluck the waves out of the pond and take them home with you in your backpack, because the "waves" are just peaks and troughs in the puddle of water (the medium). Hence, there should be some sort of medium for light waves, and the physicists named this medium "aether".
However, difficulties soon developed. If you have a jar, you can pump the air out of the jar, and then the jar will no longer transmit sound, demonstrating that the wave medium (the air) has been removed. But, there was no way to remove the aether from a jar; no matter what the experimentalists did, you could still shine light through it. There was, in fact, no way of detecting, altering, or experimenting with aether at all. Physicists knew that aether must be unlike all other matter, because it could apparently pass through closed containers made of any substance. And finally, the Michelson-Morely experiment showed that the "aether" was always stationary relative to Earth, even though the Earth changed direction every six months as it moved about in its orbit! Shortly thereafter, the inconsistencies were resolved with Albert Einstein's Theory of Special Relativity, and everyone realized that aether was imaginary.
Shortly thereafter, during the 20th century, physicists discovered two new forces of nature: the strong nuclear force and the weak nuclear force. These two forces, as well as electromagnetism, could be described very well on the quantum level: they were created by the influence of mediator particles called (respectively) gluons, W and Z bosons, and photons, and these particles obeyed the laws of quantum mechanics just like electrons and mesons did. The description of these three forces, as well as the particles they act upon, has been neatly unified in a theory of physics known as the Standard Model, which has been our best known description of the universe for thirty years now.
However, gravity is not a part of this model. Making an analogy to the other forces, physicists have proposed a mediator particle known as the "graviton". The graviton is thought to be similar to the photon, the gluon, and the W and Z bosons, except that it is massless and has spin 2. I posit that the "graviton" is essentially the same theory as the "aether": a misguided attempt to explain something by reference to similar-seeming things that were explained in the same way. Consider the following facts:
And, with reference to the graviton itself:
So, what's really going on here? I don't know. I'm not Albert Einstein. But I suspect it will take someone like him- someone brilliant, very good at physics, yet largely outside the academic system- to resolve this mess, and tell us what's really happening.