Depsite the “aether drag” experiments coming up negative, it has always seemed to me that there must be a medium of some kind out there, and I think that science continually predicts it.
For example, how are gravitational waves propagated if not through a medium? In this case, the medium is “space-time” itself, supposedly. Now space itself seems an odd medium, but if it can propagate waves, then what else can you call it? If space is a medium, and by definition, space fills all of space, then is that not a kind of “aether”?
How about vacuum fluctuations? What exactly is fluctuating if nothing is there? It seems if something is fluctuating, there must be a “something” to fluctuate, hence a medium.
Then there is the “cosmic microwave background radiation”, which is distributed throughout space. Relativity tells us that matter and energy are interchangeable, so why does a medium only have to be composed of matter? Wouldn’t a distribution of energy throughout the universe itself qualify as a medium?
Or how about gravity itself? If space is a true vacuum, a true nothing, then there's nothing for gravity to bend, yet gravitational bending of light is observed. There is clearly a medium in which light propagates. The warp and woof of it is observed, and yet has been denied. You can't bending "nothing", ergo: there is something. Call it aether, call it quantum sludge, but if it walks like a duck and it quacks like a duck, well, the scientists don't have to call it a duck if egos won't permit, but the existence of the water fowl cannot be denied.