There IS a 3-D aether. The only trick needed to make sense of the universe is to recognise its existence, and to recognise that it defines a preferred frame. It is not easy to tell what this frame is, but in practice this hardly ever matters. It's a matter of principle, though. Dayton's Miller's experiments should be checked and re-checked until a definitive answer is obtained. (See http://www.orgonelab.org/miller.htm ) The aether controls the speed of propagation of radiation and of all forces, but in most real situations this is not critical. What matters is the positions of the masses that are causing the forces. This is what makes Einstein's ideas of General Relativity so nearly right. His Special Relativity, though, is bunkum from start to finish. Light is a wave. I have a model of the universe in which ALL forces are closely linked to light, all relying on the same underlying waves. (Initial ideas on this to be found in http://www.aber.ac.uk/~cat/Papers/phi-waves.pdf .) They need a medium and nobody has disproved its existence. What more is there to be said?

All problems of relativity theory simply vanish once you've installed the aether! Bring back absolute time, too. It does not matter that there are difficulties in establishing simultaneity. Just because we human beings are not able to measure something does not mean we need to banish that thing from our fundamental models. Do we hold back just because we can't actually measure the masses of the planets? Do we refrain from modelling the production of energy in the Sun? We can't measure these things either.