One that's been confirmed against hundreds of predictions to over a dozen decimal places? Yes.
I was just clarifying, you said that it was ruled out "as soon as quantum mechanics was invented" which clearly isn't right. Anyway, I had just meant LET versus SR, but what exactly is the experimental evidence against an aether? Obviously QM gets along pretty well without it and the vocabulary is incompatible... but the vocabulary of QM is incompatible with the vocabulary relativity as well.
Because there's a HUGE distinction between a theory like Newtonian gravitation and a "theory" like phlogiston, even if they're both "false".
Maybe, but they're still both false! What exactly is the distinction you have in mind?
I'm saying, "Successful theory of physics A was simple, and theory B was simple, and C was simple, and D, and E, and .... , but there's a new class of phenomena which needs a new theory, so this theory will probably also be simple."
This would be a lot more convincing if the most recent and most successful theory of physics weren't such a glaring counter-example. We count on induction because we have no other option but this kind of thing is meta-induction (that changes in our understanding of regularities has regularities) hasn't been justified enough to make it a tool in eliminating approaches.
"Approach" here is a HUGE misnomer. "Approach" is a term commonly used in engineering to mean "different ways of accomplishing goal X". You can build a machine in manner A to do X, or manner B. This ABSOLUTELY DOES NOT generalize to science, because there's only ever one reality. If you have theory A and theory B both purporting to explain some phenomenon X, either A or B must be wrong, while in engineering sometimes there are ten different ways of attacking a problem, depending on what your goals are.
I disagree. Even under the naive theory of truth that is popular here we don't know in advance which theoretical apparatus will yield the right explanation for phenomenon X. While that is still an open question people might come to different conclusions about which way is most promising. As agreement here seems unlikely it makes sense to just have physicists work in the areas they think will be most fruitful. And then once you notice that theories of physics have this nasty habit of turning out false... well then I don't even know what you're using to declare A right and B wrong. Yeah "A or B must be wrong" but that is a seriously inclusive or. When we don't know which theory is right, when they're both probably wrong or if that turns out to be a nonsense question since they're empirically equivalent it then makes a lot of sense to think about the benefits working under different sets of theoretical assumptions (i.e. approaches). That isn't a prescription for anything goes. Some approaches are stupid and laughable. Others are powerful and clever. So I think "approach" nomes just fine.
(fyi, the downvote isn't mine)
Even under the naive theory of truth that is popular here
Which one is that? Do you mean naive in the sense that it is 'unsophisticated' or do you mean 'actually wrong because it is too simple'? If the latter you could well be right but I'd like more information.
- 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.