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Just Chat! / Re: What to do if your question is too long to fit in the title bar?
« on: Today at 11:22:13 »
Your response set me off in the direction of Michelson- Morley, and it occurred to me that the remaining proponents of aether point out that you can't measure the one-way speed of light, but the refutation of aether frequently misses a simple trick.
Suppose we are travelling east-west through the aether. So I build a rigid frame that simply projects a beam of light E-W and reflects it back to the source. Now rotate the frame to N-S. Without even measuring the transit time, it is obvious that the beam will be deflected (twice) by the flow of aether and simply will not return to the source. But it does.
To my delight, I find that the Wikipedia entry on "length contraction" starts from the MM experiment and states that LF contraction is an attempt to reconcile MM with a stationary aether, with the implication that Einstein simply decided not to start from Dublin but to assume the constancy and maximality of c.
Suppose we are travelling east-west through the aether. So I build a rigid frame that simply projects a beam of light E-W and reflects it back to the source. Now rotate the frame to N-S. Without even measuring the transit time, it is obvious that the beam will be deflected (twice) by the flow of aether and simply will not return to the source. But it does.
To my delight, I find that the Wikipedia entry on "length contraction" starts from the MM experiment and states that LF contraction is an attempt to reconcile MM with a stationary aether, with the implication that Einstein simply decided not to start from Dublin but to assume the constancy and maximality of c.