Firstly I'd like to apologise for the tone of my initial message. I'll endevour to treat Roy's views with a bit more respect this time around.
"Roy Royce" roy_q_royce@hotmail.com wrote in message news:BAY9-F548BalNhW1vg600005270@hotmail.com...
First, let me thank Mr. Wales for his reasonable reply.
But I find it sad that some people are willing to dismiss a simple fact without even trying to check the cited source.
Here are the relevant quotes from Wheeler's book, _Spacetime Physics, page 148 (1963 edition):
"Commentary: The equivalence of energy and mass is such an important consequence that Einstein very early, after his relativistic derivation of this result, sought and found an alternative line of reasoning that leads to the same conclusion." "[A. Einstein, Annalen der Physik, 20, 627 (1906)]"
"However, to secure a derivation free of all direct reference to relative principles, he [Einstein] based the conclusion p = E on the following elementary argument." [etc., etc.]
The fact that E=mc^2 does not support SR is not merely "my fact."
I never said anything about that one, remember? I snipped it. I didn't want to get into a technical discussion on this mailing list, where most readers are not familiar with relativity. Save it for the talk page of the article.
Also, posting to the Newsgroups per se does not make one a crank.
Indeed.
I challenge anyone here to find where I lost any argument to anyone in the Newsgroups.
Who said anything about losing arguments? I've never known a crackpot to lose an argument, by their own concession.
I hate to say this, but Mr. Tim Starling is either a liar or an easily-fooled person because I have never - by any stretch of anyone's imagination - except Starling's - suggested "a direct test of some aspect of relativity which is hugely expensive or perhaps even technically impossible."
Two very important questions:
1. What would be my motivation to lie? 2. Who am I being fooled by?
And I have never ignored "the huge body of slightly less direct tests of the same theory," and I have not then "obliquely suggested some sort of conspiracy theory to explain why no-one is spending millions of dollars on his simple test." And it is complete balderdash to say of me that "Everywhere he goes, he feels persecuted by co-conspiring mainstream physicists, who are out to suppress the 'truth' he has discovered."
Mr. Starling, I demand either an apology or some proof of the above serious accusations.
I apologise. I was making generalisations. As a matter of curiosity, what is your estimate for the cost of this experiment?
Now that I have proved the validity of the E=mc^2 fact, I should be taken seriously when I note the one-way light speed facts that not only has no one ever made such a measurement using two clocks, but such a measurement (sans man's interference by definition or convention) is physically impossible.
The fact that no one has ever used two clocks to measure the one-way speed of light is a part of scientific history.
The fact that this has long been technically feasible is also a part of scientific history.
The only fact that is personally mine is the obvious conclusion that such an experiment cannot be performed.
If any of you still insist that it is possible, then the burden of proof is on you to show how it can be done without first forcing your pre-chosen (and baseless) result (by using some definition of clock synchronization).
In other words, can anyone out there in WIKI-land tell us the step-by- step process for using two clocks to measure light's one-way speed sans any interference from man?
If not, then my final fact has been validated by you all.
(And that fact tells us that there can be no light postulate because where there is no experiment, there can be no prediction (or postulate)).
(Bear in mind that Einstein's light postulate pertained only to the one-way speed of light. He did not have to postulate re the round-trip case because it had already been essentially closed by the round-trip Michelson-Morley experiment.)
I think you misunderstand the function of this mailing list. This kind of discussion should be continued on the article talk page. Most readers of this list are not interested in a technical discussion, debating an idea on its merits.
-- Tim Starling.