[daveshorts]

I don't think that Einstein proposed a mechanism for the time dilation - he just produced a set of equations which neatly combined electromagnetism into one force, and have since been shown to work again and again.

Whether equations need mechanisms on a fundamental level is really quite deep philosophy, and every mechanism will end up with 'because that's how the universe is' after digging down through enough layers, and it is not obvious to me that is a great problem, unless you can find evidence for another deeper layer of mechanism underneath it.

A lot of problems with special relativity stem from trying to apply it to situations which it wasn't designed for. It only works for inertial reference frames - moving at a constant velocity, this means that the twin paradox can't be solved using it - moving two twins apart and then moving them back again involves accelerations, which are not included in special relativity.

To deal with these you need General Relativity, which is 'difficult', seems to involve a 1000 page A4 text book which sits 'waiting for a couple of years' to read on most academic physicist's shelves and which I avoided at undergrad. But I am assured by people who would love to prove it wrong (Nobel prize anyone) that it fixes the problems everyone has with special relativity.

I am not saying that there can't be problems with General relativity (though it has passed all the tests it has had so far) but that to propose them you need to understand it at lot better than I do. Happy reading....

[David Cooper (OP)]

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