Say a good word for the "poor ether"

Now we make a supplementary remark concerning the ether. Frankly speaking, the inventing, apart from the "absolute emptiness" (not possessing physical properties), of the other concepts of "physical vacuum"-type (possessing physical properties) is unfair with respect to many previous researchers (plagiarism), since for similar concepts there exists already a special term - "the ether". Only for the ether the problem was stated: to explain all experiments on a simple and clear model or "to go out from the scene". The further development of physics introduced another practice (remember the dualism of light, the quantum mechanics, etc.): the contradictory properties have become to be simply postulated as a fact without explanation and without a real visual model. Let, for example, to be existing a two-component liquid model for describing the contradictory properties of superfluid helium (the flow without viscosity through a capillary and the presence of viscosity at rotation). The reality is far from the model, but the model really works (it is useful). And only the theory of ether was unfairly ruined by the relativists. Though, in fact, for all ether models declared unreal by relativists there were analogies in the nature (but what can be greater expected from the model?). For example, there is nothing surprising in the fact that the speed of light can remain the same as the ether density changes: the speed of sound in air for $T=constant$ does not depend on the air density as well. There is nothing unnatural also in the fact that the ether density can essentially (60000 times only) increase near the Earth surface as compared to the open space (the density of the atmosphere grows many orders of magnitude greater). The Stokes model is a model without the atmosphere. The mathematical complications of the model (the supposition on a vortex-free incompressible motion) are pure at anything here: the real (nature describing) solution can occur to be close to that found by Stokes (simply it is mathematically more difficult to find the true stringent solution of nonlinear partial differential equations without simplifications). For the sake of justice we note that rather well-developed concepts of ether are existing now [1,8].

Now we proceed to more specific issues and make brief comments to some well-known experiments. The aberration in the empty space without SRT was analyzed above from the viewpoint of both corpuscular and wave theory. The result will be the same from the viewpoint of the motionless ether theory as well. The full ether entrainment by a medium is not clear in the case, if the medium density gradually decreases (for example, in gases). By this reason nobody (except the relativists) has seriously discussed the full ether-entrainment hypothesis. Even ether were fully entrained by solid and liquid bodies, analysis could not be simple. In this case it is necessary to develop a theory of a transition layer between bodies and a theory of boundary ether layer for gases depending on gas density (for example, we could not dealing with the Earth's orbital speed of 30 km/s as such in Michelson's experiment). However, physics chose the other way, and it was still Fresnel, who introduced the coefficient indicating, that only partial entrainment of ether can be supposed in the optically transparent media. It does not virtually (to achieved accuracy) change the aberration in filling a tube with water, which had been shown by Fresnel himself. (Note that if the observation is non-vertical, it is necessary to take into account the angle of refraction of beams in filling media, but, generally speaking, all similar questions are ascribed not to the theory of aberration but to the theory of refraction.) The only case, where it is lawful to discuss the full ether entrainment hypothesis, is the case of optically opaque media (metals). Maybe it was Hertz, who intuitively felt this situation, when he refused from the very beginning to consider the optical phenomena from the viewpoint of his electrodynamics (by this reason the application of his theory by relativists with discrediting purposes for dielectrics is invalid).

Trouton and Noble's experiment does not contradict Galileo's principle of relativity for the empty space. Generally speaking, all experiments with dielectrics do not contradict Galileo's principle of relativity, since the light (or the field) passes a part of its path in the emptiness between atoms and the other part of a path - when the light is absorbed and re-emitted by atoms. For the theory of partially entrained ether (if there is no metal screening) the Fresnel entrainment coefficient can always be defined with the practical accuracy which is verified in both the experiments of first and second orders (but frequently the precision turns out small and really it must be introduced some "fitting" coefficients). The Rowland experiment has actually proved that, from the ether theory viewpoint, the ether is fully entrained by a metal, and from the viewpoint of Galileo's principle of relativity he proved the moving charges equivalence to the current. Roentgen, Euchenwald and Wilson have actually obtained in their experiments the Fresnel coefficient of entrainment in dielectrics.