Eric, your humor continues to this day. We are all at the mercy of the experimentalists unless we become those guys ourselves. Relativity seems to be completely at odds to our everyday expectations and that is true. I am confident that when it was first proposed a lot of guys went ballistic in attempting to shoot it down. But the tract record is extremely good from what I have read. Also, I have made plenty of attempts to find holes in it and have never been able to make serious headway. The obvious paradox that we have been discussing does have an explanation according to some sources that I have seen. I recall one article where numbers were carefully put to paper where the authors swore that they yielded the correct and expected answer. I am sorry to say that I did not quite follow their logic, but I assume that it was due to my hang ups.
If you ever find a verified error in the theory please allow me to share the Nobel prize with you! :-) Dave -----Original Message----- From: Eric Walker <[email protected]> To: vortex-l <[email protected]> Sent: Wed, Feb 19, 2014 9:56 pm Subject: Re: [Vo]:Time Dilation impossibility On Wed, Feb 19, 2014 at 9:42 AM, David Roberson <[email protected]> wrote: Why not first consider the speed of electromagnetic wave propagation as either being constant or not regardless of the motion of the reference frame. To me this is an obvious situation, almost be definition. Start by making your cases either for or against. I'm at a loss in this instance. I have not taken the time to do the measurements, so I am at the mercy of the experimentalists. My understanding of what they're saying, as conveyed through the popular press and in history books, is that in whatever context the speed of light has been measured, it has been measured to be constant within a small margin of error. Further, I've heard that the theorists will claim that when you assume that light is constant, we're able to do things like calculate the advance of the perihelion of Mercury. I trust that the experimentalists believe what has been claimed on their behalf, and I trust the theorists that the calculations become tractable. In this context I'm willing to assume that the speed of light is constant, and follow this assumption to where it leads, despite the fact that my everyday intuition tells me that light should slow down and speed up in a vacuum if you approach it or recede away from it. My everyday intuition tells me that electricity is made of blue fire, but that's also incorrect. Eric
