I took a look. Einstein is said to have disproved the existence of the aether when he did special relativity,
I am always uneasy when you start telling people what physicists supposedly did or didn't do or what the prevailing views supposedly are. This is because you don't seem to get your information 'from the horse's mouth' but rather through people summaries of the science. For example, SR does not disprove an aether, let's be very clear about that. It rather, as has been said, shows you can explain the relevant phenomena without needing an aether. You cannot disprove such a thing, no matter how much you experiment because no amount of experiments can prove it's impossible to construct some model which is aether based and explains the experiments. All 'Model X disproves model Y' statements are implicitly dependent on some assumptions. Such assumptions are often not discussed in pop science summaries.
Physics is awash with 'no go theorems'. They are 'proofs' that it is impossible to explain something using some model or concept. However, all papers proving no go theorems will state the assumptions they start with. For example, one of the most famous no go theorems of theoretical physics is the
Coleman-Mandula theorem about symmetries of quantum field theories, which was the motivation for people looking into supersymmetry. It states you cannot non-trivially mix the Lorentz symmetries of the field theory's space-time with the gauge symmetries of the (unsurprisingly) gauge fields using Lie algebras (which form the mathematical structures associated to such symmetries). However, one of the assumptions of the theorem is that you're considering Lie algebras. Supersymmetry is a
graded Lie algebra, a fundamentally different construct, and thus it 'evades' the theorem. Similarly, any local Lorentz-covariant quantum theory will have CPT symmetry by the
CPT theorem. If a theory isn't Lorentz covariant the CPT theorem doesn't apply, so it wouldn't apply to a model which doesn't have Lorentz symmetry. If the theory isn't local then it wouldn't apply either. So while some literature might talk about the CPT theorem as 'fact' it is contingent upon the assumptions of the theorem, as with any logical deduction. This is a subtly which competent physicists are well aware of and which may not be said explicitly in literature but is implicit and something one physicist will assume a fellow physicist is aware of. This is something you have missed in your superficial skimming of the literature, yet another example of how your failure to go 'direct to the source' is hindering your understanding of mainstream physics on even a qualitative level!
For these reasons special relativity
cannot disprove an aether. In fact we have an explicit example of this because
Lorentz aether theory has the same predictions as special relativity in its domain of applicability. This is an example of why explaining phenomena using one model doesn't preclude explanations of a different sort from another model. Aether is not considered of interest because it requires additional assumptions, thus falling foul of Occam's Razor, it doesn't extend to a more general gravitational model, unlike special relativity, and no one has presented any additional experimental evidence to believe an aether exists, hence Occam's razor again. Special relativity, when it was published, 'killed' aether models not by disproving them, it didn't, but rather providing a more mathematically structured, extendible model which used the least assumptions. Until someone can provide an aether model which can do all that relativity (special
and general) can do with similar levels of accuracy and similarly low numbers of assumptions aether is 'intellectually dead' to the physics community at large,
not as you claim 'disproven'.
but when he did general relativity, he reintroduced it in a different form.
Just as Dirac thought an aether exists. However, that was in an age of very sparse experimental data compared to today and very little was understand about the nature of general relativity, even by Einstein. Einstein gave the foundations of general relativity but it was others which explored the implications and discovered black hole solutions, possible compact dimensions, unification with classical electromagnetism, inflationary universe models and how to put quantum field theory into a general space-time. As such Einstein really knew very little about what he'd helped create.
Besides, I'm sure you wouldn't accept it if one of us quoted a famous physicist as our only means of presenting our case, as it would be an argument from authority and quote mining. You can always find a quote by some at least vaguely well known physicist/mathematician who will agree with whatever case you wish to make. Newton thought gravity travelled instantaneously, Einstein didn't. Newton thought the Bible was full of prophetic codes, pretty much no one else in physics did/does. Penrose thinks our minds are beyond the ability of any Turing machine to describe, others do not. Rather than simply saying "Professor A says something which aligns with my views" and someone else saying "But Professor B says the opposite!" it's important to consider the specific details of why they said those things, to discuss the reasons not the conclusions. That's the way to understand and discuss such things and it's why it's important to understand the quantitative details of physics, not just superficial qualitative stuff.
"Recapitulating, we may say that according to the general theory of relativity space is endowed with physical qualities; in this sense, therefore, there exists an ether. "
'May' is not 'must'.
"It is ironic that Einstein's most creative work, the general theory of relativity, should boil down to conceptualizing space as a medium when his original premise [in special relativity] was that no such medium existed"
Personally I don't view GR as saying qualitative stuff much beyond what SR says qualitatively, given the fact the qualitative things SR has to say about space-time from a geometric point of view are basically the same as GR. But hey, I'm sure my opinion is less worthy than Einstein's or someone on Wikipedia, let's just listen to them and not bother to form opinions of our own by developing working understanding of what we're talking about, right?
Relativity isn't wrong, Christos. Just misunderstood.
And you, someone with such poor mathematics skills you are functionally innumerate and couldn't even get onto a physics university course, never mind work your way through to the GR course and blitz it, are the person who understands GR with some insight most do not have? You are only able to 'understand' GR by reading other people's wordy explanations, relying on the metaphors and analogies they make in order to convert abstract heavily mathematical formalisms into something close to being within your qualitative grasp. You're unable to explore the specifics of what GR says, to see the structures and logical deductions for yourself, to do them for yourself, so you're hardly in a position to be claiming you understand GR with some kind of insight beyond people who do. This is the same as your claims about understanding electromagnetism better than Dirac and being a 'world expert' in it. It's easy to make superficial qualitative
assertions, it's another thing to show they are actually implications of the models by doing the details, that they lead to statements about the real world which can be investigated. As yet you have failed to show
any of your 'understanding' in any area of physics, including areas you believe yourself worthy of 4 Nobel Prizes, can say anything quantitative at all, never mind provide derivations of such quantitative conclusions. Even string theory has you beat on that front!