You might want to check out this paper in .pdf format. It deals with
what they still refuse to call 'aether'.
http://xxx.lanl.gov/abs/gr-qc/9903094
Quintessence, the Gravitational Constant, and Gravity
Authors: Takeshi Chiba
Dynamical vacuum energy or quintessence, a slowly varying and spatially
inhomogeneous component of the energy density with negative pressure, is
currently consistent with the observational data.
One potential difficulty with the idea of quintessence is that couplings
to ordinary matter should be strongly suppressed so as not to lead to
observable time variations of the constants of nature.
We further explore the possibility of an explicit coupling between the
quintessence field and the curvature. Since such a scalar field gives
rise to another gravity force of long range ($\simg H^{-1}_0$), the
solar system experiments put a constraint on the non-minimal coupling:
$|\xi| \siml 10^{-2}$.
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