Wish we worked on IMUs, I still need to get down quaternions
The Michelson–Morley experiment was indeed very important, but it has not proved in any way the non-existence of ether. It has just proved that the ether does not behave as it was previously supposed, i.e. like the materials with which humans are familiar.
It does not matter at all what names are used for it, one may choose to name it "ether", "vacuum", "electromagnetic field", "force field" or anything else, but all the modern physics, since James Clerk Maxwell and William Thomson, is built on the assumption that the space is not empty, but it is completely filled with something that mediates all the interactions between things.
Only before the middle of the 19th century, the dominant theories of physics assumed the existence of true vacuum. The existence of true vacuum is possible only in the theories based on action at a distance, like the Newtonian theory of gravity or the electromagnetic theory of Wilhelm Eduard Weber, but not in field-based theories, like the electromagnetic theory of Maxwell or the gravitational theory of Einstein.
It is rather shameful for physics that the main result of the Michelson-Morley experiment has been the replacement of the word "ether" by "vacuum", as if a change of name would change the thing to which the name is applied, instead of focusing on a better understanding of the properties of the thing for which the name is used.
edit: not sure if you're referring to dark matter
yeah I gotta read your comment more thoroughly
No, the idea was that, in a space filled with the hypothetical ether, Earth's velocity through the ether should have been detectable by comparing light beams traveling in different directions.
The null result was very important -- it didn't prove the absence of an ether, it only showed that it wasn't a factor in light propagation.
The obvious question to ask at this point is, "so ether is back on the table?".
Turns out the mistake is, as GP said, thinking MM proved space is empty; it only disproved a particular class of substances with particular properties. But that's not how they tell you about it in school.
That interpretation is also consistent with LIGO: we can detect those ether disturbances because the distortion of our motion on the apparatus doesn’t cancel the signal in the same way.
Or maybe an invisible pink unicorn is sneaking into the lab at night and tweaking things.
Please don’t reply with such trite anti-scientific comments, which conflate actual scientific claims with nonsense.
If you have an actual objection, then you should present it. But argument by mockery because you fail to understand modern physics lowers the quality of the discussion.
Really? Where in the Standard Model do I find the luminiferous aether that you suggest the apparatus is made of?
The current aether for light is called “EM field”; matter is made of other fields demonstrated to unify at high energies by the LHC and similar experiments, within the standard model. But you knew all that.
You’re just pretending ignorance to avoid addressing my central thesis: fields are aethers.
Well, yes, of course. This is a discussion of Michelson-Morley interferometers. In that context the word "aether" has a very specific and well-established meaning, and it is not at all the same as a quantum field.
> fields are aethers
You are free to employ the Humpty Dumpty theory of language and redefine the word "aether" if you like. But in the context of Michelson-Morley interferometers, no, quantum fields are not "aethers". The whole notion of making the word "aether" plural in that context is non-sensical. In the context of Michelson-Morley interferometers there is only one aether: the luminiferous aether, a hypothetical physical substance that exists in three-dimensional space. Quantum fields are not even remotely like that. They are not physical. They do not exist in 3-D space. They cannot be directly measured. Physical objects are emergent properties of fields, but they are not "made of" fields. The constituents of a piece of lab equipment are particles, not fields.
That's kind of like saying that our failure to observe invisible pink unicorns does not prove the non-existence of invisible pink unicorns, it just proves that invisible pink unicorns don't behave the way you expect them to.
Luminiferous ether was a specific hypothesis about how light works. It made a prediction, which turned out to be wrong, which falsified the theory. Whether you want to attach the description "proves the ether does not exist" or "proves the ether does not have the properties ascribed to it by the theory" is completely irrelevant.