>>12627882>Yeah dude, because physics has a long history of beautiful speculative models being correctMost of the most beautiful incorrect theories had a good idea that eventually gets incorporated into a correct theory.
Kelvin vortex ether atoms was one such beautiful failed theory. The idea here was that the ether could have topological defects, and that these defects would make flow-rings that can link into different types of links. Then the elementary atoms were knots, and the molecules are links. The theory was killed by Rutherford scattering, which revealed a non-topological point model of the atom as a solar-system, which was later made quantitatively precise.
A modern version of this topological defect idea is the Skyrmion, which shows that unlike the atom, the proton and neutron can be viewed as topological defects in the pion condensate, the modern relativistically invariant version of the ether (which also has the virtue of being correct, unlike the old ether ideas). This idea can not only predict the nucleon pion cloud, it can predict the structure of some light nuclei qualitatively. In conjunction with string theory, it's accuracy can improve to semi-quantitative prediction of the structure of the nucleon, at scales larger than where you see individual quarks and gluons.
