What is pilot-wave theory, and does quantum action at a distance point to an ether?

Pilot-wave theory, from Louis de Broglie, says every particle is carried along by a real physical wave. That only makes sense if there is a real medium for the wave to travel in, and that medium is the ether. The ether is also what allows gravity and quantum correlations to act across enormous distances far faster than light. Start with the problem pilot-wave theory was invented to solve. Light behaves like a particle and like a wave. Electrons do too: send them one at a time through a double slit and they still build up an interference pattern, as if each one somehow knew both slits were open. Louis de Broglie, the 1929 Nobel laureate, proposed that each particle has a pilot wave running ahead of it. The particle goes through one slit; its wave goes through both. The interference is in the wave, and the particle rides it. Now ask the question the textbooks skip: a wave in what? A wave is a disturbance of a medium. If matter needs a pilot wave to move, that tells you something about what it is moving through. The medium must be so dense and so granular, and yet so unponderable, that matter can only make its way through it by wave motion. De Broglie himself went exactly this direction. By 1971 he was calling the ether "the hidden medium," a subquantum thermostat, and he said the particle always occupies a well defined position in space within its physical wave, with the randomness coming from energy exchanges with that hidden medium. That is Descartes' fixed points and Newton's absolute space brought back by a quantum physicist. He was not alone. Dirac said in 1951 that with the new electrodynamics "we are rather forced to have an ether." De Broglie returned to the ether hypothesis in 1959, and Stark, Arrhenius, Lenard, Yukawa and Soddy took up similar investigations. J. P. Vigier published a paper in 1980 with the title that says it all: "De Broglie Waves on Dirac Aether: A Testable Experimental Assumption." Even Einstein reintroduced the word ether for General Relativity, though he insisted his was not ponderable and not movable, which is precisely the point modern quantum work is pressing against. Here is where the distant effects come in. In 1935 Einstein, Podolsky and Rosen argued the particles were simply carrying hidden instructions. Bohr's school said no, the particles somehow know what each other is doing. Bohm suggested in 1952 that the two views could be reconciled. Then in 1964 John Bell showed that if you send two electrons back to back to detectors an equal distance away, they invariably produce opposite spins, and it makes no difference how far apart you put the detectors. Aspect and others confirmed it experimentally. To explain that, you have to invoke a long range physical connection between the particles, and that immediately obliterates Relativity, which forbids anything traveling faster than light. Vigier saw the trap clearly and said so before Aspect ran the test: if superluminal interactions are real, the contradiction between Relativity and the quantum theory of measurement has to be decided in favor of a real, nonempty, physically active vacuum. It was, and it does. Gravity is the same story on a larger scale. Tom Van Flandern showed that the Earth does not accelerate toward where we see the Sun; it accelerates toward a point about 20 arc seconds ahead of the visible Sun, which is where the Sun actually is right now. Light from the Sun has an aberration; gravity has none. Why do binary pulsars anticipate each other's future positions faster than light could carry the information? Why does a total eclipse reach mid eclipse about 40 seconds before the gravitational alignment? Van Flandern concluded that six experiments show gravity propagates far faster than light, perhaps billions of times faster, and that the light carrying medium, which he named elysium, and the gravity carrying agents are two different media operating at different scales. In other words, gravity acts essentially instantaneously, which is exactly what Newton assumed, and what Mach needed when he said the gravity of the distant stars is transmitted instantaneously to produce inertial effects here on Earth. It is worth remembering too that Einstein admitted his light speed limit belongs to Special Relativity, not to the General theory. Put the pieces together and you have my point. Relativity has to deny the ether, and having denied it, it cannot explain the pilot wave, or entanglement, or the speed of gravity, or inertia, without contradicting itself. Restore the medium and all four have a physical cause. That is the argument of my book A Googolplex of Tiny Blackholes, where I propose that space is composed of Planck dimension particles and work out from that the cause of gravity, inertia, action at a distance, entanglement, the anomalous rotation of spiral galaxies, and the speed of light. And here is where it touches geocentrism. A universe with a real medium, structured and stable, is a universe that can have a center and a firmament that does not suffer the instabilities of the wormholes and black holes of the relativistic picture. The pilot wave is one of the threads; pull it and the whole modern cosmology starts to come apart.