Re: Mach's principle and aether

On Mar 12, 8:34 pm, Tom Roberts <tjroberts...@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Amine wrote:
I doubt that SRT's twin paradox scenario would work in a background-less
universe.

It does. Indeed, SR is based on Minkowski spacetime, in which there is
no matter at all, so there's no "background" of the type you mean.

Except the space between the ears of a few usenet posters
the universe that we know of seems rather devoid of matter-free
experimental arenas. It seems unfair to say SR has no
experimental basis when its author mentions some work by
W. de Sitter that seems quite supportive of SR's second
postulate.


<< The first postulate says that there is no experiment
we can do that can determine whether it is we who are
moving, or the ground, or both. >>
http://www.physics.fsu.edu/Courses/Spring98/AST3033/Relativity/GeneralRelativity.htm


That too... seems a difficult to conceive
in a universe absent any matter.


Sue...


I guess this is what I was trying to get at. You doubt, but what makes
you doubt? Is there any published work on refereed journals about
this? (And no string theory, please.)

Any SR textbook. Such as: Taylor and Wheeler, _Spacetime_Physics_. This
is such old hat that it would not be published in any journal of the
past half-century or more.

It seems that GR assumes a distant, fixed background. Why are we
afraid to call this background Aether?

GR makes no such assumption. It assumes that the world can be modeled as
objects and fields on a spacetime manifold. To date there are no solid
and reproducible observations or experiments that refute such a model.

I don't mean that the distant background
itself is the Aether, but rather the prevalent metric it generates.

The difference is that an aether is a physical medium, and the spacetime
manifold is a MODEL of the spatio-temporal relationships we observe
among objects. They are completely and utterly incommensurate.

Tom Roberts

.

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