sun orbits earth

[rayheinrich]

Where's this from? Sounds a bit odd. All inertial frames are equivalent, but the earth around the sun is an accelerated frame of reference and therefore not equivalent to its opposite. Also, gravity as an imaginary force post dates the concept of ether, which went out in 1905.
Rather odd.

I think he was referring to a newer ether theory: dark matter doesn't exist, it's an ether field that increases the gravity.

"Starkman and colleagues Tom Zlosnik and Pedro Ferreira of the University of Oxford are now reincarnating the ether in a new form to solve the puzzle of dark matter, the mysterious substance that was proposed to explain why galaxies seem to contain much more mass than can be accounted for by visible matter. They posit an ether that is a field, rather than a substance, and which pervades space-time. "If you removed everything else in the universe, the ether would still be there," says Zlosnik. This ether field isn't to do with light, but rather is something that boosts the gravitational pull of stars and galaxies, making them seem heavier, says Starkman. It does this by increasing the flexibility of space-time itself . "We usually imagine space-time as a rubber sheet that's warped by a massive object," says Starkman. "The ether makes that rubber sheet more bendable in parts, so matter can seem to have a much bigger gravitational effect than you would expect from its weight." The team's calculations show that this ether-induced gravity boost would explain the observed high velocities of stars in galaxies, currently attributed to the presence of dark matter."

Here's where that came from:
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2...082306.php