Eric, I agree with you that special relativity is going to be a hard one to bring down. I have tried plenty of times to no avail.
An ether does not appear to be required for the transmission of electromagnetic waves. My first encounter with that issue came up in fields classes when my professors derived the speed of travel for an electromagnetic disturbance by using factors that are measured at steady state conditions. It seemed remarkable that the electric fields for static charges and magnetic fields measured for steady currents could enter into a differential equation that predicted the velocity of light. Combine the static measurement support and the brilliant insight of Einstein and his special relativity theory and everything falls into place. Dave -----Original Message----- From: Eric Walker <[email protected]> To: vortex-l <[email protected]> Sent: Tue, Feb 18, 2014 11:25 pm Subject: Re: [Vo]:Time Dilation impossibility On Tue, Feb 18, 2014 at 6:39 PM, John Berry <[email protected]> wrote: Also, I would genuinely like to know if anyone disagrees with my arguments, or fails to understand them. I had a hard time following your examples and counterexamples, but I suspect that relativity will not be so easy to pull apart. There's probably a misunderstanding about one or more of the claims it's making. I get the impression that relativity fits the known facts to within a very small error, and that any thought experiments concerning corner cases that are far removed from everyday experience nonetheless remain internally consistent. It will probably require more than a simple thought experiment to call it into doubt. And if you do agree, would you conclude that an aether of some type is logically required? I do not imagine an ether is required as a result of a failure of relativity due to internal inconsistencies. I think it just makes conceptual sense for a wave (e.g., electromagnetic wave) to be a wave traveling in some medium. What is that medium? Perhaps something like an ether. An ether that meets this simple requirement, however, is not necessarily something that one would be able to detect. Eric
