It certainly is!

This was actually very present in my mind when I read about Hatch's idea, because I'm currently reading Hawking's "A Brief History of Time", and he goes into the proof against ether. Of course I'd heard of it before, but since nobody else mentioned it and I had been thinking about it already, I simply had to.

It's amazing what people who haven't learned their physics think about physics! It reminds me of another new version of an old theory of physics I read about on one of these posts - a new expansion theory of physics, which would require us to throw away everything since Newton. Pretty arrogant, and the explanations for it amounted to declarations by fiat that it was so - there was no evidence for it at all, and in fact require great convoluted maths in order to explain our observations. The author of that particular theory was apparently unaware of Newton's inverse-square law of gravity, nor Einstein's more accurate formula for the same, and the extensive experiments demonstrating it over the last couple hundred years.

Note that I'm not saying I have learned my physics even as well as these misguided would-be physicists have, I'm just saying I would never propose a new theory of physics without be certain it hadn't already been conclusively disproven!