🚀 go-pugleaf

Pentcho Valev wrote:
>
>http://blog.hasslberger.com/Dingle_SCIENCE_at_the_Crossroads.pdf
>Herbert Dingle, SCIENCE AT THE CROSSROADS
>p.27: "According to the special relativity theory, as expounded by
>Einstein in his original paper, two similar, regularly-running clocks,
>A and B, in uniform relative motion, must work at different
>rates.....How is the slower-working clock distinguished? The
>supposition that the theory merely requires each clock to APPEAR to
>work more slowly from the point of view of the other is ruled out not
>only by its many applications and by the fact that the theory would
>then be useless in practice, but also by Einstein's own examples, of
>which it is sufficient to cite the one best known and most often
>claimed to have been indirectly established by experiment, viz.
>'Thence' [i.e. from the theory he had just expounded, which takes no
>account of possible effects of accleration, gravitation, or any
>difference at all between the clocks except their state of uniform
>motion] 'we conclude that a balance-clock at the equator must go more
>slowly, by a very small amount, than a precisely similar clock
>situated at one of the poles under otherwise identical conditions.'
>Applied to this example, the question is: what entitled Einstein to
>conclude FROM HIS THEORY that the equatorial, and not the polar, clock
>worked more slowly?"

Although Dingle was attacked on all fronts in a shameless way it was 
clear that at that time there was no clear consensus. In fact "FROM HIS 
THEORY" there was no way to reach that conclusion.

  The H&K experiment would have been impossible without a clear answer to 
that question. They accepted an idea put forward by "Geoffrey Builder" 
in 1958 - his paper being one of the references in the H&K paper. The 
accepted answer, was that it is only an inertial observer - at the pole 
in the H&K case - who is entitled to hold a valid opinion about the 
physical fact of the relative rates of the clocks. Any observer whose 
state is not 'inertial' within a necessary degree of precision can 
conveniently be assumed to automatically come to some erroneous 
conclusion and can be ignored.

What is interesting is that while H&K quoted G Builder's 1958 paper a 
statement in that same paper says:

"Thus we conclude that the relative retardation of clocks predicted by 
the restricted theory does indeed compel us to recognise the causal 
significance of absolute velocities ........ there is therefore no 
alternative to the ether hypothesis" [1] :o)

[1]  Builder, G. Ether and relativity, Aust..l. Plys. vol. 11, 1958 
p.279.
-- 
John Kennaugh