(July 18, 2013 at 5:08 pm)Statler Waldorf Wrote:(July 18, 2013 at 2:43 pm)Cthulhu Dreaming Wrote: You have reason to suspect that it's not synchronous? Please, feel free to suggest a testable hypothesis to explain how the speed of light through the same medium is dependent on travel direction.
Please do. We could use a laugh.
A laugh? Why would you laugh? Nothing I said was inaccurate. You seem to be arguing from a Newtonian understanding of synchrony rather than an Einsteinian understanding of it. It’s impossible to demonstrate that it takes millions of years for the light from distant galaxies to reach Earth; you can stipulate that it does, but that proves nothing.
“That light requires the same time to traverse the path A → M as for the path B → M is in reality neither a supposition nor a hypothesis about the physical nature of light, but a stipulation which I can make of my own freewill in order to arrive at a definition of simultaneity” – Einstein, Relativity: The special and general Theory, 1961
I'm fully aware of the nature of the problem you raise, Statler. I'm also aware that Einstein is taking about paths A → M and B → M while I'm referring to A → B and B → A. I fully recognize the futility in attempting to measure any such difference between the two.
What's funny here is not that there might possibly be a difference, but that some propose that there is a difference without providing any sort of explanation as to how it might be so.
Perhaps on one leg of the journey little green men got out and pushed, perhaps?
