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wnoise comments on The Graviton as Aether - Less Wrong
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Ohhh. I see what you're saying. Maybe there was a kind of hero worship... But a big reason, and the reason I took you to be giving, for preferring SR over Lorentzian aether is that SR makes GR possible. And there is no equivalent theory based off of aether theory. So the thinking (as I understand it) isn't Einstein produced SR and GR, GR is brilliant and true therefore so is SR. Rather, SR is pretty good and better than Lorentzian aether because from it Einstein produced GR which is brilliant and true.
Einstein's SR and GR work were actually looked on with huge suspicion for a while. It was his work on Brownian motion and quantization evidence from the photoelectric effect that were originally so warmly welcomed.
Can you say more? My understanding was that SR was picked up pretty quickly for more or less the reasons Einstein preferred it. But I'm not that familiar with the history.
Not without actually doing research -- I'm trying to speak at the level of generalities. It's perhaps wrong to conflate the reactions to SR and GR, and I'm possibly overstating how welcoming the community was to the idea of photons being quantized, but I think there is a reason his Nobel prize was given "for his services to Theoretical Physics, and especially for his discovery of the law of the photoelectric effect", with no explicit mention for either SR or GR.
I thought that was more about the committee being cautious and favoring experimental evidence over abstract theorizing. You don't want to give someone a Nobel prize and have them quickly turn out wrong.