Re: Experimental Evidence for Special Relativity

John Kennaugh <JKNG@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Tom Roberts wrote:
John Kennaugh wrote:

[...]
Recap. My argument was:
Photons have mass as clearly demonstrated by the fact that they gain
energy when attracted to a massive object and lose energy in exactly the
same way any projectile does when escaping the gravity pull of a massive
object. They have momentum in that when they hit something pressure is
felt. If you work out the mass then the same value works in these 3
cases and every other.

That's "gravitational mass."

SR says nothing with mass can travel at c

That's "rest mass." The two are very different, in both theory and
experiment. For example, the rest mass of an electron is, by definition,
a fixed quantity, independent of its motion, while we observe that the
gravitational mass of an electron in an atom includes a comtribution
E/c^2 from its kinetic energy.

so current theory is therefore clearly wrong.

Well, at least your understanding of current theory is clearly wrong.
SR most certainly does not say that nothing with gravitational mass
can travel at c. You've simply scrambled two similar-sounding terms.

What you actually said was:

" Specifically: giving photons a mass larger than the current upper
limit causes electrodynamics to not agree with experiments."
TR 11 June 2008

This is a statement about experiment. You will find a recent review in
http://arxiv.org/abs/0809.1003.

Steve Carlip
.

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