> "the empty vacuum of space … is filled with 'stuff' ... The modern concept of the vacuum of space, confirmed every day by experiment, is a relativistic ether."
Laughlin’s ‘stuff’ is the smoothly distributed, strongly interacting, supersolid dark matter that fills ‘empty’ space and is displaced by ordinary matter.
Einstein: Ether and Relativity http://www-history.mcs.st-and.ac.uk/Extras/Einstein_ether.ht...
> "According to the general theory of relativity space without ether is unthinkable"
Einstein’s ether is the supersolid dark matter that fills ‘empty’ space and is displaced by ordinary matter.
You could educate yourself. Go study quantum mechanics and the Heisenberg uncertainty principle. Learn about particle fields, vacuum fluctuations, virtual particle pairs, and the Casimir effect. Find out what this "boiling sea of vacuum energy" actually is, and why one might call it ether, and in what sense that would be true.