Einstein's Revolution, and Counterrevolution By Tom Bethell

"With an hour's wait at Penn Station, I picked up a copy of Walter Isaacson's new Einstein biography Einstein: His Life and Universe (Simon & Schuster, 675 pages, $32), turned to the index, and started to read a particular passage. I was impressed. I had feared that this would be one more exercise in hagiography, describing Einstein's askew love life, his left-wing politics, his first wife who didn't get credit for her contributions to relativity, and his thoughts about God, all decked out with garlands to the great man's genius and his epic contributions to science. But no. It was more than that. Here is what I read, on page 318:

... after he finished his theory of general relativity, [Einstein] concluded that the gravitational potentials in that theory characterized the physical qualities of empty space and served as a medium that could transmit disturbances. He began referring to this as a new way to conceive of an ether. 'I agree with you that the general relativity theory admits of an ether hypothesis,' he wrote Lorentz in 1916."

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