Eetteri elää

John Bell, interviewed by Paul Davies in "The Ghost in the Atom" has suggested that an aether theory might help resolve the EPR paradox by allowing a reference frame in which signals go faster than light.[2] He suggests Lorentz contraction is perfectly coherent, not inconsistent with relativity, and could produce an aether theory perfectly consistent with the Michelson-Morley experiment. Bell suggests the aether was wrongly rejected on purely philosophical grounds: "what is unobservable does not exist" [p.49]. Einstein found the non-aether theory simpler and more elegant, but Bell suggests that doesn't rule it out. Besides the arguments based on his interpretation of quantum mechanics, Bell also suggests resurrecting the aether because it is a useful pedagogical device. That is, many problems are solved more easily by imagining the existence of an aether.

Quantum mechanics can be used to describe spacetime as being "bitty" at extremely small scales, fluctuating and generating particle pairs that appear and disappear incredibly quickly. Instead of being "smooth", the vacuum is described as looking like "quantum foam". It has been suggested that this seething mass of virtual particles may be the equivalent in modern physics of a particulate aether.