Strange

It is not "precisely" what you are doing. You are strggling to articulate some half-formed notions by way of confusing analogies. Those who understand the maths and science have done it precisely (you can find papers describing cosmology in these terms).

You are about 200 years behind the times! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacquard_loom

The fact that some things (not everything) are relative does not make them hard to measure. If anything, it makes them easier. If you want to know how fast your car is going, the only thing that matters is its speed relative to the road; you don't care about the Earth's movement around the Sun, the Sun's orbit around the galaxy, etc. You can, of course, describe expanding space in terms of shrinking matter instead. This alternative choice of coordinates doesn't change anything, just the way you describe it. It adds complexity (such as the speed of light no longer being constant) and most people find it less intuitive. But when you have mastered GR you will be able to publish any number of articles reanalysing things in these terms. If anyone cares.

You will find an enormous number of people insisting that the aether exists (I'm really not sure why; no one still insists phlogiston exists). You can basically ignore them (the technical term is "crank" or "crackpot"). You will also find a lot of respectable people using the term aether/ether as an analogy to refer to things that exist everywhere. I have seen gravity, spacetime, electric fields, the Higgs fiels, quantum fields in general, "quantum foam", dark energy, virtual particles, empty space and many other things referred to in this way. None of these (with the possible exception of the electromagnetic field) are what the term aether originally referred to. The people in the first group will often cherry-pick quotations from the second group to try and support their contention that the aether exists. Einstein's Leiden speech is often used for this purpose: in this he reviews the nature of the orignal aether and why it cannot exist. He then points out that "empty space" does have certain properties, even if it is not a physical thing, and draws an analogy with the aether.

http://www.wired.com/2014/12/dress-made-3-d-printed-plastic-flows-like-fabric

This is very similar to the balloon analogy sometimes used to explain cosmology. Your balloon is deflating, therefore distances should be getting smaller. That is not what we observe. Even as an analogy, it seems to be contradicted by evidence.

Light is reflected in optical fibres billions of times.

Maxwell's equations describes light as oscillations in the electric and magnetic fields. (So you can think of the fields as the "medium" if you want. Although a lot of people would argue that the fields don't exist.) Quantum theory describes light as (crudely) as little packets of energy (photons). The fact that light doesn't need a medium is just one of the many surprising things that science tells us about the world.

I tried. I assumed it was one of the many things I was ignorant of. I couldn't find any information about it. Is it a term you have invented? If so, you had better explain it. So I can assume you are providing the speed in feet per fortnight? Can you explain this experiment in detail then, and show us the curve. (I gather that this might be in your video but I don't watch videos for a number of reasons including the fact that I think they are very poor way way of presenting technical information). I am sure it is exactly as important as all the other people who claim that about their new theories. Some of those are familiar but searching for "5 basic string shapes" or "trion re" doesn't get me anywhere. Perhaps you could educate us. Then perhaps you could present it. If you can't be bothered, I don't see why I should do your work for you. Light travels along an undefined path at a velocity of ((3x10^8)+1)/3 feet per yer when viewed through an undefined curve. Got it.

One the few pop-sci books on my shelf. So I can actually check the context. (My copy doesn't have that note; presumably it was added in response to tedious pedants pointing out that light travels slower through a medium.) It is ignored in the book because it is irrelevant to the subject being discussed. If you failed to understand that simple point. then presumably you didn't understand anything much in the book. The varying speed of light in different media is, of course, well understood and has been studied for hundreds of years. I would recommend Feynman's book QED for a non-technical explanation of the fact that, even in a medium, photons always travel at the speed of light. What the heck is a "trion re"? What units is that in? If metres/second it is out by a factor of 3. Or, possibly, you have failed to understand what you read. (Based on your comments here, that sounds the more plausible hypothesis.)

Yeah, I'm no good at this "out of the box" nonsense.

It is an incomprehensible one. That is why we are asking you to clarify it. This post is similar to a green turnip balanced on a pyramid.

The author cl;aims that it is an "assumption" that there is no aether. He either denies or is ignorant of all the many lines of evidence that falsify all possible (*) aether theories. The entire essay appears to be an argument from ignorance/incredulity. There seem to be an enormous number of people who, because they have failed to understand some basic step in their education, assume everyone else is wrong and only they have seen the truth. It is a bit sad, really. Especially as many of them, like this author, seem to dedicate years or decades to their misconception when a few hours hard work might allow them to make progress. (*) Apart from Lorentz Ether Theory, which is indistinguishable from Special Relativity. Which makes its inclusion of the aether utterly pointless.

Perhaps you could explain the relationship between simple harmonic motion and contraction. I don't see it. And why would moving it from one place to another change contraction to expansion? A ball bouncing in my back yard behaves identically to a ball bouncing in my kitchen. In fact, that is one of fundamental symmetries in the universe and one of the axioms that relativity is basd on.

This is a relatively non-mathematical explanation: http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/einstein/einstein.html

You do realise that this make zero sense? How can bouncing up and down be the same as things getting smaller (and/or getting closer together, depending what you mean by "contraction").

Your answer is no more logical than any of the others. Unless, of course, you are using the usual "personal theory" meaning of logic, which appears to be "it makes sense to me because I thought of it".

That assumption was found to be false when tested. That is the way science works.

No. It is not quantized in the same way as, say, electric charge.

Only one? Not very imaginative or "out of the box" thinking. Just to be clear, the question was "why is the universe like it is". There are several possible answers that I can think of (and I think it is a pointless question - I'm sure people who think it important or interesting can think of dozens). Just to get started: - Because if the universe did not behave like that, we would not be here to ask the question. - God made it that way - ot ast least, she made this one like that. - If the universe were differnt we would be asking why it was like that. - There are multiple universes with different properties so there is no reason for us being in this one - Fundamental laws of physics mean that only one possible configuration is possibel - And so on. So was everybody else. Your guess didn't pinpoint which component was faulty and so is completely useless. It did not "leak". It was announced at a press conference. The reason they announced it was becuase they wanted help to understand what was wrong. It hit the headlines because it would be exciting if true. Philosophy is just down the hall.

Except the ruler doesn't expand because it is held together by electrostatic forces. There is no problem with (apparent recessional) velocities greater than c. You are applying something dervied from special relativity (a subset of GR that only applies to inertial frames) to a problem that requires GR. The "speed limit" only applies locally; i.e. wher SR is can be used as an approximation. They don't contract they stay the same size. Because they are bound by various forces. In the absence of any force, objects will tend to move apart - which is what expanding space means.

Science has answers to all these questions. You seem to be asking why science gets those answers, in other words, why is the universe like it is. That is philosophy, not science and there are, I assume, an infinite number of possible answers to choose from according to your desires. None of them are testable, therefore none of them are science. We already have good theories. You are not providing anything new, in terms of science, so I don't know what you expect people to do. If you had some evidence that showed that GR was wrong, or some mathematical idea of how to unify GR and QM, it might be different. But just coming up with random speculation about stuff that only makes sense to you isn't going to encourage anyone to look at it.

So this sphere you describe: where is it? Is it detectable? 1 is not a set. It may be a member of a set {1, ...} but it is not itself a set. Sets do not have a value. Unless you mean that all sets must contain the value 1? Which is trivially false (e.g. the empty set or the set of all primes do not contain 1).

You are assuming that these two forces originate from, or act towards, a single point. Where is this point? How would we identify it? How do you explain the fact that this contradicts the apparent homogeneity and isotropy of the universe? (Which has been measured very precisely.) Changing the coordinates used so that instead of space expanding, matter contracts is well-understood (as are many other equivalent conversions). People don't do it because it isn't very useful and (for most people) is counter-intuitive. I really don't understand what you are trying to say here. C is a speed. Your diagram appears to show that if you move at (or at a speed approaching?) c in one direction, you get gravity but if you move at c in the opposite direction you get expansion. Is that what it is meant to show? This does not appear to be supported by evidence. For one thing, stationary objects experience gravity. Also, any efgfects we observe due to motion are independent of direction: it doesn't matter whether they are moving in the +ve or -ve direction. And velocity is relative so what are you defining speed relative to? There is no observed connection between speed and rotation. (And, as speed is relative, there can't be.) It is not that simple. It is more that the orbital speed at different distances from the centre only makes sense if there is more mass in the galaxy than we can see; simple Newtonian physics.

Give that man a cigar!