Why doesn’t this apply to Stokes total aether drag theory? George Gabriel Stokes knew about a number of experiments that tried to detect the aether wind and failed, and he made a model where the aether behaved like a non-Newtonian fluid: fluid without viscosity at low speeds (such as the Earth’s), but solid at high frequencies. That way, it could host high-frequency light waves while posing no resistance to ordinary moving objects, and moving objects would drag light along with their movement.
The theory came out in 1845, in 1851 Fizeau measured the speed of light in moving water and found that the water didn’t drag the light with its full speed.
What happened here (in your language) is that this theory had N bits of length and was based on N+ε bits of evidence, and the new experiment disproved it. I don’t see anything in this post that differentiates between Stokes and Einstein, except for the hindsight that Einstein’s theory works. The key sentence is:
“how likely is it that Einstein would have exactly enough observational evidence to raise General Relativity to the level of his attention, but only justify assigning it a 55% probability?”
For most theories, this is exactly what happens. Based on the history of GR we can see that was not the case there, but you can’t just state that a priori, because GR is an outlier here, an outlier that requires explanation. Does this arrogance apply to the expectation of no neutrino oscillations? To the nonexistence of the Poisson/Arago spot? Why not?
For linkposts, is self-promotion frowned upon? I have written a post that I believe would be interesting to readers here, but it’s on Substack (free and with no intention of paywalling!). Can I create a linkpost for it?