<BLOCKQUOTE id=quote><font size=2 face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" id=quote>quote:<hr height=1 noshade id=quote>[LB]: Another difference between SR and LR is that in SR there is no aether, period.<hr height=1 noshade id=quote></BLOCKQUOTE id=quote></font id=quote><font face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" size=2 id=quote>
Einstein was a pretty smart fellow. The problems with relativity can be largely attributed to his followers, not to E himself. For example, E never accepted the possibility of "black holes".
On the point about the aether, Einstein was finally driven by reason and experiment to accept the reality of some sort of aether, and even hinted at recognizing that it had to coincide with the local gravitational potential field. For example, we read in Einstein's "Ether and the theory of relativity", Springer, Berlin (1920), reprinted Dover (1983), p. 23: “According to the general theory of relativity space without ether is unthinkable.” According to Einstein, aether could be equated to the gravitational field. “The aether of the general theory of relativity is a medium without mechanical and kinematic properties, but which codetermines mechanical and electromagnetic events.” It was inferred that the aether must be incompressible so that longitudinal waves did not exist. Cf. "Albert Einstein: Philosopher-Scientist", Ed. P.A. Schilpp, Tudor Publ. (1951). Then in "Einstein: the first hundred years", Ed: M. Goldsmith, A. Mackay, J. Woudhuysen, Pergammon Press, Oxford (1980), pp. 58-59: “Thus [Einstein] regarded his field theory as in essence a kind of revival of the notion of a space-filling ether, which is, however, relativistic rather than non-relativistic. But somehow Bohr could never take such views seriously and probably regarded them as naïve, a return to ‘primitive realism’.” Einstein noted that Lorentz had taken over all the properties of the original aether except its immobility. -|Tom|-
