There's some physics forums I lurk and occasionally post in, and every time the discussion goes beyond physics, holy shit are their opinions dumb as fuck. Just getting someone to understand a simple point that anyone could understand with like 2 sentences just feels like wading through mud with them because every time anything seems to challenge one of their preconceived opinions at all (or if they just don't understand it because they're out of touch) they get annoyed, and then they fixate on irrelevant parts of your point until you have to explain that part of your point again and again and again, and then everyone forgets what it was even about. Especially the boomers in there.
Then there's the ones "helping" people, who will basically act like they are doing a MASSIVE courtesy to you by explaining things, so they'll put people through the shredder for misunderstanding something or for phrasing the question in a way that isn't absolutely perfectly 100% crystal clear as if their compiler is giving an error or something.
And it's not just people in forums, like almost all the professors I know are also just complete morons about anything even slightly unrelated to their specialty.
Why are science nerds like that, I fucking hate it. Like holy shit grow up >:(
I'm pretty sure he doesn't believe photons are "waves through nothing" and was using the phrase as a means to explain the mysteriousness that the luminiferous ether had at the time. He eventually reaches the conclusion that as a thing entirely unknowable (the absolute velocity/absolute length being unknowable quantities) it eventually reached the point where we could claim the ether didn't exist. The most antiquated thing I remember in the first chapters was his use of relative mass which I don't believe is used anymore, as we used invarient mass when I took physics in college. When I looked up what the difference was between relative and invariant mass it seems that if we use relativistic mass you must do calculations for and assume both a longitudinal mass and transverse relativistic mass versus using just an invariant mass which would result in a simpler calculation with the same results. I just reached the point where the chapters no longer have titles, but I've been reading the same book haha.