Light's determinate geodesic path through space and time at constant velocity, c, represents the most fundamental action of mainstream science. In fact, science only know that the world exists because observers see light traveling at constant velocity and that constant velocity means that energy is equivalent to mass and also that space and time shrink and dilate with increasing relative velocity.
Discrete aether defines the action of light instead as an oscillation of aether with matter and not time and matter oscillates in a universe of matter bonded by light exchange. Bonded by aether exchange light moving through space and time bonds matter with light photon exchanges are stationary aether oscillations in the primitive coordinates of matter and action and it is the decay of aether shrinkage everywhere that observers see stationary aether oscillations that they call light. The observers of the universe flow to the aether oscillations of stationary light by aether exchange and it is not light that moves to observers from sources.
The equivalence of matter and energy is also fundamental in aethertime as it is in spacetime, but instead of space and time, it is the action of aether exchange that defines light as an oscillation. And it is from aether decay that space and time emerge from the action of aether.
We only know about the universe because of our encounters with light and so we quite naturally think of light moving from sources to observers in rather straight determinate paths. Thoughts that observers and the universe somehow shrinks toward the light are already confused concepts because of the use of terms that presume space and time. When we interact with a photon of light from a source, for some very short quantum decay time our matter becomes part of the source and the source becomes part of us. Therefore that quantum phase decay time is a very important part of physical reality.
Since energy is equivalent to mass, the energy of light is equivalent to an aether exchange oscillation with the aether field. Thus the action of light is equivalent to an exchange of aether at a frequency, ω, relative to the universe phase decay, mdot. Time and space both emerge from the natural oscillation and decay of the universe and that natural spontaneous oscillation and decay is the way things change.
Photons in science are states of vacuum oscillators and those oscillators fill empty space with an infinity of ground state energies. Aether photons are also an oscillation, but now of the very large but finite number of aether particles that make up the universe. Aether does not fill the empty vacuum of space over time but instead our notions of space and time emerge from the oscillation and decay of aether particle phase.
Instead of filling space with an infinity of vacuum oscillators for the action of photons of light, space and time emerge from the action of light as aether and the action of aether is what defines space and time in aethertime.