Good article, Glenn.

Allow me to proffer an additional view on time dilation being silly.

Tool: Tape Measure (measuring distance).

Subject: Older person (who shrunk compared to the younger self)

Tool: Clock (measuring time)

Subject: Cesium (that changed behavior when placed in a distinct spatial position from clocks on Earth)

Time dilation is the same as declaring the tape measure to have stretched instead of the person to have shrunk. With stretching the tape measure, we do indeed get the correct answer of a smaller measured distance. Yet it is wagging the dog.

That's the additional view.

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I am not enamored much with the aether.

Instead, I consider Space to be real, yet a phenomenon. That means there are no attributes to Space itself.

Space does not move.

Space does not interact with anything.

Space has no borders.

When planet Earth moves through Space, that Space has no effect on the planet at all. It is the presence of other matter in the spatial setting that declare the specific behaviors of planet Earth and these other masses.

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Going back in time, 13.8 billion years ago, we do not start out with gravity. Rather, we start out with the materialization process, which tells us two important things:

1. It had to set itself up to produce the results we witness.

2. It broke the mold of the setup.

Like a toy's mechanism wound up too much until it broke, the toy's special ability disappeared forever.

So, starting out with Energy and Force (ability) in that prior state, the Force got applied so the Energy ended up breaking out of that original framework.

The one Force, ended up becoming four forces.

As such, we start out with Motion, and only after Motion got established do we find Gravity playing its role in the larger setting.

I don't mind the aether, but we can already tell the same story without the aether.

We have to except then, however, that Space is indeed a true Nothing. Real, but truly Nothing.

Thank you for the article. I enjoyed reading it.