🚀 go-pugleaf

On Jan 16, 5:37 am, Eric Baird wrote:
> :SR's SECOND POSTULATE:
> I do think that there are some general arguments in favour of the sort
> of lightspeed-regulation effect mentioned above, but most relativity
> people probably won't like them, because these arguments also tend to
> undermine the geometrical basis of the special theory.
>
> Special relativity's second postulate is //nominally// that all legal
> inertial observers are allowed to claim that the speed of light is
> constant w.r.t. them ...
> ... but the way that SR //implements// lightspeed constancy is more
> specific ... it presumes that lightspeed is //globally// constant for
> the theory's observers, and that the lightbeam-geometry of a region
> containing a collection of differently-moving bodies is therefore
> necessarily "flat". That rules out the alternative possibility of a
> relativistic light-dragging model. Special relativity's use of
> language (and its math) depends on the idea that the sort of
> complicating gravitomagnetic effects above (which would turn the
> exercise into a curved-space or curved-spacetime problem) don't exist.
> SR people sometimes say that we "know" that these variations don't
> exist, because we "know" that the speed of light is constant, and that
> this is supported by experiment ...
> ... but actually, experiments such as Fizeau's indicate that
> measurable short-range lightspeed-dependencies do seem to exist in
> real life, between the speed of light and the speed of the emitter,
> observer and any other masses in the neighbourhood.
>
> These effects seem to be short-range. They show up in signals sent
> between moving conglomerations of atoms, and in these situations we
> tend to respond, not by saying that SR's lightspeed model is basically
> wrong, but by saying that that special relativity doesn't claim
> validity for particulate-matter effects. Unfortunately, all observers
> and objects in the real world would seem to be made of particulate
> matter, so SR's second postulate, in the way that SR applies it, would
> only seem to be truly valid for "unphysical" bodies whose behaviour
> doesn't actually correspond to the behaviour of real bodies in our own
> universe.
>
> IMO, SR may yet turn out to be the correct answer to the wrong
> question. If we accept that the moving matter does seem to interact
> with light, and we interpret SR's second postulate to mean that the
> speed of light only has to be //locally// constant, then the result
> isn't necessarily special relativity.
>
> If we drop the "traditional" idea of global c-constancy and apply a
> more GR-style concept of local c-constancy in its place, then we still
> seem to be able to arrive at a GR-like geometrical theory of
> gravitation, but it becomes quite difficult to difficult to justify
> saying that that theory ought to reduce to special relativity.
>
> If real particles are expected to have mass and energy, and are
> expected to be associated with curvature, then it's more difficult to
> justify the existence of a zero-curvature solution as real physics.
>
> Special relativity might conceivably turn out to be a null solution -
> mathematically pretty, but not guaranteed to be foundation theory.

Imagine a world where, istead of resorting to idiotic verbiage,
scientists initially cite Einstein:

http://www.fourmilab.ch/etexts/einstein/specrel/www/ "...light is
always propagated in empty space with a definite velocity c which is
independent of the state of motion of the emitting body."

Albert Einstein: "If the speed of light is the least bit affected by
the speed of the light source, then my whole theory of relativity and
theory of gravity is false."

Then scientists just say: "The speed of light does depend on the speed
of the light soulrce" or "The speed of light does not depend on the
speed of the light source".

Would that imaginary world be incommensurable with Einstein zombie
world?

Pentcho Valev
pvalev@yahoo.com