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The existence of the aether was regarded as beyond serious question, the experiment to reveal it was regarded as technically challenging but completely foreseeable – the aether would be found to exist, no notable physicist at the time doubted this.

So, it was “beyond serious question”, yet they questioned it. Isn’t that actually proof that the very people that you say are dogmatic are willing to question themselves? These experiments weren’t performed at the Vatican. They didn’t come from some other set of methods that someone devised to test the truth of a proposition. It was science doing what science does.