> Does anyone defend this as being useful for anything? Extreme relativistic phenomena like "spooky action at a distance" or the Alcubierre's warp engine foldi

> Does anyone defend this as being useful for anything? Extreme relativistic phenomena like "spooky action at a distance" or the Alcubierre's warp engine folding space may be intuitively easier to grasp if you think of space as a structure made of wobbly interacting elements approaching or receding from one another, rather than extreme deformations of abstract euclidean geometry or probabilistic waveforms. For example, time ticking at different rates in different places could be explained by a constant rate of causal propagation through regions with a different density of these elements. Or, alternatively, by causation propagating at different rates going slower through elements with very high energy. This can create two competing models, which could be tested experimentally to see which one is closer to reality. (This capability to ultimately being tested empirically is the main thing that differentiates theoretical physics from scholastic speculation; if not for that, both would be rationalistic masturbations to see how far you can push your logic models, without a way to put them to the test). For a scientific theory, "being easier to grasp intuitively" may be the basis for more rapid advances over the previous version based entirely on a complex formal notation.