It's wrong to ridicule aether. It was a theory, the theory was tested, and it turned out to be wrong. Lots of theories are wrong. It's not like scientists at

It's wrong to ridicule aether. It was a theory, the theory was tested, and it turned out to be wrong. Lots of theories are wrong. It's not like scientists at the time were stupid. James Clerk Maxwell believed that an aether was required, and he was literally the first person to write down the full set of equations for electromagnetism. Occam's razor doesn't tell us that aether is less parsimonious than "Literally, time slows down when you go faster. Also, light is a particle and a wave at the same time. Kind of." Aether suffered from clear problems as an idea as the long list of weird properties it had to satisfy, and the list only got longer and longer. Dark matter isn't like that at all -- it's easy to add to our theories that there's a particle that is invisible but has mass. There's no Michaelson-Morley experiment that's extremely hard to explain.