[Le Repteux (OP)]

Here is an improved drawing, it's more straightforward. It's about the bending of starlight by the sun, and it shows that the sun's light would also be bent, which means that it's apparent diameter would look larger than what it really is, which means that the star would not be hidden by the sun since we would have to shrink it on the mapping of the stars made at night when the sun is on the other side of the earth six months later (smaller sun in the middle of the larger one). On that drawing, I added the direction the light from the star would have if the sun wasn't there (black arrow), and I added the sun at the dimension it would have if that dimension was not enlarged by the curved space, and it shows that the star wouldn't be hidden by the sun anymore. The only explanation I find is that the light wouldn't be curved, that it is only the dimensions of the objects that would look enlarged, as if the presence of the sun would expand the whole space around it. Do you have another explanation?

[Le Repteux (OP)]

The earth has no acceleration, neither has any other planet, galaxy etc. So I'm not sure what you're thinking of in the MM experiment. That was a setup to measure a presumed aether wind. And light doesn't accelerate, it's more of a state than a speed.

I'm actually studying inertial acceleration, the one a ball suffers when we throw it, not gravitational one. I've put it here on my thread on curved light since inertial acceleration also curves light.

[evan_au]

I'm actually studying inertial acceleration, the one a ball suffers when we throw it, not gravitational one.

I am confused by this terminology - please clarify.
- I thought that in an "inertial frame of reference", an object is in microgravity, and cannot tell if it is being accelerated.
- The ISS is in an inertial frame of reference; the astronauts inside cannot tell that they are being accelerated - but if they look out the window, they can see that they are at a constant distance from the Earth, so gravity is accelerating them, and bending their path into an orbit.

When you throw a ball, there are three phases:
- An initial acceleration, when you throw it
- An inertial period, in microgravity, where it follows a parabolic path
- A final deceleration, when it gets caught, embeds itself in the sand (or whatever)
- Only the middle period is "inertial", and it is clearly being affected by gravity

This sounds contradictory to me.

[yor_on]

Ok, inertia versus geodesics (gravity). "Einstein used the fact that gravitational and inertial mass were equal to begin his Theory of General Relativity in which he postulated that gravitational mass was the same as inertial mass."

And it's equivalent as far as I see, then again. Think of a spaceship following a geodesic in uniform motion, somewhere far from any 'proper mass' aka suns planets etc. Then let it make a turn. To do so it will expend energy and so accelerate. Anything breaking a geodesic must accelerate.

Will you feel a inertial force acting on you? Sure.
Did you accelerate? Yep

But there was no 'gravity'?
Well, did you follow a geodesic?

[Le Repteux (OP)]

Hi Evan and Yor,

Of course gravity is everywhere, but when studying SR, we can observe only SR issues. SR is about relative speed, it necessitates contraction and dilation, but when we accelerate an object, it starts moving at the beginning of the acceleration, so contraction and dilation must begin right there. My hypothesis is that contraction would be due to atomic bonding taking time to bond atoms, so that if we accelerate one of the atoms of a two atoms' molecule, the molecule will have time to contract before the other atom is pushed away by whatever the bond is mediated by. That's what this drawing was about:

I did not make the drawing of the two atoms accelerating sideways to their bond when I described it, but I guess I'll make it now so that we can better figure out what happens.

[Le Repteux (OP)]

Here is a first attempt. A molecule made of two atoms (one red one blue), representing the vertical arm of the MM interferometer, is traveling to the right at constant speed from T0 to T2 (the timing period is the time light takes between the two atoms at that moment), it is accelerated from T2 to T5 (the distance doubles during the time light takes between the atoms), and it travels at constant speed from T5 to T7.  Before and after acceleration, let's consider that the two atoms are synchronized. The red and blue arrows represent the direction the light from an atom has to have to reach the other atom. During constant motion, the atoms do not observe any aberration or doppler effect even if there is some because the speed and direction of the emitting atom is the same as for the detecting one, but as soon as they are accelerated, they do. In fact, the speed of the emitting atom will always be lower than the one of the detecting one, so the light, which strikes the detecting atom at an angle, will be redshifted at detection, and the direction of that light will be affected by aberration as if the two atoms were traveling at the same speed since they are, thus it will point to the actual position of the atoms even if they are accelerating. In my model, the atoms would then move in order to stay synchronized, and they would move in the direction of the light they detect, so I figured that they would move towards one another until the acceleration stops since that way, they would reduce the redshift they detect.

That's what my drawing shows: the distance between the two atoms contracts from T2 to T5, and I managed to keep the timing constant while keeping constant the distance light has to travel (red and blue arrows). As for the acceleration of the horizontal arm, the synchronism between the atoms is broken during acceleration even if the atoms try to keep up, but since they do, as soon as the acceleration stops, that synchronism is rapidly recovered. The recovery period happens between T5 and T6, where the atoms have stopped accelerating while the blueshift from the other atom's speed is still increasing: it is increasing, but it is not yet equal to the redshift produced by the speed of the atom that has already accelerated, so as the drawing shows, the contraction should go on until T6, where both the speed of an atom is constant and the frequency from the other atom looks constant. I didn't talk about that recovery period for the atoms of the horizontal arm since I didn't notice there had to be one. In that former drawing, the acceleration of atom A stops at T4, but since it takes time for atom B to notice it, it's own acceleration stops only at T5. Think twice before making a move, because all your atoms are working so hard to stay synchronized when you do! :0)

[Le Repteux (OP)]

What those two drawings show is that there could be a hidden information carried by the light exchanged between the atoms of moving bodies, an information that would be introduced during acceleration and that would tell the atoms which way to go not to get out of sync once the acceleration would have stopped. It is easier to figure how it works with LET than with SR though, because SR says that there is no doppler effect nor aberration between bodies that are in the same reference frame, as if there was no motion at all, whereas with LET, those bodies can still be traveling with regard to aether, and we can then observe the way light would behave between them. If my two inline atoms were really traveling with regard to aether, there would be doppler effect at emission, which would be completely absorbed at detection later on. But this kind of doppler effect cannot produce the actual motion of the other atom because it takes time to make an effect. It is only if we observe what happens at acceleration that we can understand the one that could produce motion, because we can observe that it accumulates between the atoms during the time light takes to move the other atom away. We can also observe the way the distance between the atoms would contract, the way they would get out of sync, and the way they would recover their synchronism after the acceleration would have stopped.

What about time dilation then? Would we still need it to explain that kind of observation? Would light take more time between my two inline atoms once they would have been accelerated for instance? Let's observe what would happen if the first atom would accelerate to almost the speed of light and then stop accelerating just before hitting the second one. The distance between the atoms would almost get to zero before the second atom would begin to get away, and as soon as it would, the first atom would almost immediately move in its wake while the light from the moment it was accelerated would still continue to accelerate the second one. After a short while, the two atoms would then be moving at almost the speed of light in the same direction, because the redshift produced by the leading atom would equal the blueshift produced by the lagging one, but would light take more time to make the roundtrip between them? It would take almost no time for the light from the leading atom to reach the lagging one, so we can rely on the time it would take in the other direction. David's simulation of MMx shows that light would take twice the time if contraction was half the distance, but what if it would be more than that, what if contraction had nothing to do with the synchronization of the arms, and everything to do with the timing between the atoms wether they would travel vertically or horizontally to the motion? What if atoms from both arms would act separately to stay synchronized. Wouldn't that be more logical?