In the late 1700’s La Sage proposed an explanation for Newton’s gravity. It took the form of a proof that an inverse square attractive force can be generated by two bodies shadowing each other from an all pervasive background of smaller bodies impacting them. Using the then new calculus, he showed that as these smaller bodies are arbitrarily small and the size of the shadow bodies gets small relative to their separation, an inverse square relation is produced. This background of small impacting bodies constitutes an aether.
In relation to General Relativity, La Sage produced a similar mechanism for Newtonian gravity. Once Special Relativity was in play there developed a differential form of Special Relativity for accelerating frames prior to Einstein’s General Relativity. Later Einstein produced the Equivalence Theorem whereby gravity was proposed to be equivalent to an accelerating frame of reference (matter effecting the hypothetical “space-time”).
La Sage would have answered that gravity alters the path of photons in the same manner as it acts on all other entities. The three spatial dimensions and the variable of time mean that curved photon trajectories and the early differential form of general relativity (Galilean relativity) produce effects currently attributed to “curved space-time”. La Sage’s work generates the results of General Relativity without resorting to any new spatial dimensions, using only 3-D geometry, the conservation of momentum, and differential general relativity (Galilean relativity). (You may recall that it has been demonstrated experimentally that momentum is not conserved in relativistic electrodynamics.)
The LaPlacian superluminal aether is an improvement and refinement of La Sage’s aether.