An Alternative History WI ("What If?") question:

The three basic explanations for the 1887 Michelson-Morley null result are either that the Earth isn't moving round the Sun, that there is a local Ether moving with the Earth, or the most favoured, that there is no Ether.

But what if the MM result had not been null, with clear interference fringes showing up, proving beyond doubt that the Earth was moving at 18 miles per second through an absolutely stationary Ether? It would end geocentrism for sure (cheers from some!). But it would also indicate that there is an Ether. How would the history of science have differed, if at all, over the last 130 Relativity-free years? Would science have gone off on a totally different path? There would have been no need for Einstein to formulate his 1905 STR to explain the null result, & he would probably have remained an unknown.

The development of the A bomb would still eventually have happened, since Einstein was the last to derive E=mc^2, which was known before Relativity. The real question is: knowing there was an Ether, would so much effort by everyone have been put into tapping into it that by now we would have "free energy" devices & motors, like those craved for today by the sizeable minority who still believe in the Ether?
http://www.mountainman.com.au/aetherqr.htm

Huh?

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If ignorance is bliss, why is the world so full of misery?

Interesting the Maurice Allais`s Anomalous Behaviour of Pendulum experiment.
-Allais' Re-Analysis of Miller

Some Exerpts
(1) No Action at a Distance

1. No action at a distance is conceivable without the existence
of intermediary medium.

All known actions, gravitational, optical, electromagnetic,
propagate through a medium, the aether.

2. The attraction according to Newton's law of the inverse
square of the distance or Ampere's formulas are not actions at
a distance. They result from local actions which propagate
progressively across space through the aether.

Thus the Newtonian action (apparently at a distance) boils
down to two local equations:
http://www.mountainman.com.au/aether_7.htm

I concur.

Hmm... what if I were superman...?

Yes science would have progressed differently... Because reality would be different....

However, this is an extremely redundant what if, as there's little reason to consider the possibilities of reality itself being different. Scientific theory is guided by the nature of reality, so the only way to get it to progress differently is to change reality. People try to do that unsuccessfully all the time.

Ah ... but perhaps it is! "Reality" has been known to change many times!

Consult Prof Allais ...
http://allais.maurice.free.fr/English/Science.htm
and please remember that this man is a Nobel laureate!

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"True skepticism encompasses not dismissing evidence because it seems to defy rational explanation."

Of course not. You can believe in an "ether" until the end of time but it won't allow you to violate the laws of thermodynamics no matter how hard you try.

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The plural of "anecdote" is not "data".

How sure are we about the reality of Dark Energy and Dark Matter?

Might this be a case of double standards?

But if we're going along with Yannox's "what if?", then the laws of Physics would be different, and maybe the laws of thermodynamics wouldn't be the same either. Which is the problem with this whole thing, really. Unlike most alternate history, this doesn't just involve someone making a different decision, but actually rewriting the way the Universe works.

As with the EU ideas for example.

I thought that the EU ideas were trying to model the universe as it works right now, rather than wondering what would happen if we packed all that vacuum with dense plasma?

Do we have a satisfactory explanation for how it works right now?

I think the EU model may come closer to explaining much of it, without recourse to FAIRIE dust - Fabricated Ad hoc Inventions Repeatedly Invoked in Efforts to Defend Untenable Scientific Theories!

So show us your EVIDENCE

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See the relevant thread - The new EU paradigm.

BTW, you are yet to offer any evidence for Dark Matter and Dark Energy. OK, so you say that scientific methods are being used in the search, but you can use similar methods to search for Leprechauns, and it don't mean you'll find them.

Show us the evidence!

Things might not be as different as you would think. For the sake of argument, let's say that M&M botched the experiment and got a non-null result. Einstein would have still published his 1905 paper. Einstein did say around 1950 that he did not know about the MM experiment until after his 1905 paper, although there is evidence that he may have read it, but it was not his motivation for writing the paper. The main motivation was to account for the paradoxes implied by Maxwell's equations and to provide a mechanical basis for the Lorentz transform. Remember that the MM experiment did not cause ether to be instantly rejected by all physicists. There were still plenty of scientists who firmly believed that ether existed, or at least demanded that any etherless theory explain the observed behavior of light (refraction, interference, etc). In retrospect, the MM experiment killed the ether theory, but that was not obvious until much later. In this alternative history, the 1905 paper would have perhaps forced a closer look at the MM experiment, since SR and a non-null MM result are incompatible.

Except for that little Nobel Prize for his 1905 paper on the photoelectric effect.

The evidence for Dark Matter is based on indirect observation. Scientists pointed their instruments skyward in an attempt to measure the mass of galaxies. The results of their experiments suggested that the galaxies were 'too massive' for the visible light that the telescopes were seeing. More starteling was the discovery that the telescopes may only be seeing 1 - 2% of the matter. Scientists deduced that there must be matter in those galaxies that we can't see. Suerly some of this mass could be accounted for in nonluminous matter (rocks, dust, gas, etc) but not all of it. So the Dark Matter theory was born. It is nothing more mysterious than that. Leprechauns indeed.

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"Patriotism is supporting your country all of the time... and your government when it deserves it." - Mark Twain

No, Soupdragon2, you must show us your evidence. One of the rules of science is that the burden of proof rests on the presenter of a new theory. You know how suspects are considered innocent until proven guilty? Well, it works the same for scientific theories. Until a theory is proven by evidence, it is not considered to be correct.

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If ignorance is bliss, why is the world so full of misery?

Quit the logical contortionism. Dark Matter didn't come about because someone is wishful thinking about how reality should, or could be... It came about to explain the observations we're making that show there is something there. In other words, Dark matter, hypothetical or no, conforms to our observations of the universe. An MM non-null result, does not.

There is no parallel here.

But Maurice Allais' analysis of the the Miller experiments
http://allais.maurice.free.fr/English/media12-6.htm
and his claim that they indicate a non-null result seems formidable, does it not?
Where do you think Allais' case fails?

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"True skepticism encompasses not dismissing evidence because it seems to defy rational explanation."

Well, that's right. I think we can quite easily state "If the laws of physics were different we would be able to invent perpetual motion machines" - though it's hardly a startling insight is it?

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The plural of "anecdote" is not "data".