Originally posted by humyYou clearly did not read much of the link I posted. Try doing that.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aether_theories
"...The assorted aether theories embody the various conceptions of this "medium" and "substance". This early modern aether has [b]little in common with the aether of classical elements from which the name was borrowed. ..."
THAT is the reason why I refer to you to the words "analogy" and "metaphor"! ...[text shortened]... ut the above? -if so, SHOW your credentials on this and PROVE that you know better than they....[/b]
It might help the discussion if you all tried reading the Wikipedia page "Superfluid vacuum theory" which gives some background. I've no idea if the writer understood what they'd read and am not going to follow the references.
Apparently it is self-consciously an aether theory. They seem to have some extra field whose vacuum state behaves like a superfluid. The existence of superfluidity gives the appearance of Lorentz invariance at low energies, but above some very large scale vacuum excitations reveal it to only be an approximate theory. This solves the EPR paradox as there would be nothing special about the speed of light if Lorentz symmetry was only approximate.
A problem may be that one of the features of the theory is that there is is no Higgs Boson, the vacuum is different to the standard model vacuum. So if the thing found in LHC is the Higgs they're onto a loser.
I'm not claiming a good enough understanding of this to really say anything particularly authoritative, but you could call me a sceptic - but I don't think the idea is totally unreasonable either. It's a speculative theory, since there is no evidence for Lorentz breaking what so ever.
Originally posted by DeepThoughtAnd the more the Higgs Boson is thought to be real with more and more certainty the less and less likely this superfluid idea will find traction.
It might help the discussion if you all tried reading the Wikipedia page "Superfluid vacuum theory" which gives some background. I've no idea if the writer understood what they'd read and am not going to follow the references.
Apparently it is self-consciously an aether theory. They seem to have some extra field whose vacuum state behaves lik ...[text shortened]... ither. It's a speculative theory, since there is no evidence for Lorentz breaking what so ever.