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DanielLC comments on Some concepts are like Newton's Gravity, others are like... Luminiferous Aether? - Less Wrong Discussion
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Comments (10)
I wouldn't call luminiferous aether just plain wrong. Asking what it's made from doesn't make a lot of sense, but saying that that means it doesn't exist would be like saying electrons don't exist because they don't have a volume.
It's something of a simplification. People are not ideal utility-maximizers. But they're close enough that it works well.
But it was. Luminiferous aether was a fairly complex and detailed theory that was disproved in the late 1800s through rigorous scientific research. It is a shining example of how science catches its errors, no matter how useful it might be to keep the errors.
It's more appropriate to say that it was found to be unnecessary, it wasn't disproven so much as made irrelevant. (Which is to say, there's no evidence against its existence, so much as that there is no longer any evidence -for- its existence.)
More, its presence is still felt in physics. What we call space-time shares the defining characteristic of the luminiferous aether, namely being, in some models' treatments of gravity, a universal transmission medium.
Retracting: This entire line of discussion is pedantry which doesn't actually address the topic at hand, and is way too common on this thread already.