You've said a lot, and addressing each point individually would be far too taxing. So, I'll keep it brief. Firstly, we have experimentally observed time dilation with muons produced by cosmic rays. The decay process of muons also seems to provide experimental evidence for length contraction.Obvious Leo wrote:Time dilation and length contraction have not been experimentally confirmed. A temporal asynchronicity between moving clocks and stationary clocks has been confirmed, nothing more. That time dilates and lengths contract is an inference drawn from the mathematics, not an empirical fact, and a far simpler explanation for this asynchronicity is readily to hand. If we abandon the nonsensical notion of spacetime and regard time alone as being physically real then all motion occurs in the time "dimension" only, in accordance with both common sense and our innermost instincts. In this perspective we regard a clock as an entity which is coming into existence at the speed of light. However if one clock is also physically moving relative to another one they must also be moving apart in time. To suggest that one is ticking slower than the other is to say that it is coming into existence more slowly and this is plainly wrong-headed in an ordinary gravitational field. This bogus world-view relies on the contrived assumption of co-ordinate time in SR, but co-ordinate time is nothing more than a mathematical confection to reconcile the disparate observations of differently located observers. Co-ordinate time is not physically real. In fact the moving clock does tick infinitesimally slower than the stationary one during the brief period that it is accelerating, but this is a gravitational effect and in any ordinary experimental scenario it would be negligible. However negligible is not synonymous with irrelevant and herein lies the secret of quantum gravity, a subject for another day.Frank Aiello wrote:Once again, the physical theory works. Of course, I'm sure this won't be posted either, as my last post giving a fully reasonable articulation of why gravity is the manifestation of the curvature of 4D spacetime, and why the effects of relativity (e.g.time dilation and length contraction) have been experimentally confirmed within an extraordinarily high degree of accuracy, was not posted.
Continue arguing against an highly experimentally well-confirmed theory that describes almost everything we know about space, time, and motion on philosophical grounds. Continue sitting in your armchairs.
Time is not interwoven with space at all, as Minkowski would have us believe. Time is interwoven with gravity, as shown to us by GR. SR and GR are therefore mutually exclusive, so the physicists might need to pick which one makes the most sense. Both are deeply flawed but I'll go with GR as having a more coherent temporal ontology because the link between time and gravity has been empirically established countless times, whereas the link between time and space just leads us down into counter-intuitive conceptual rabbit burrows, as well as dead and alive cats. Not for me, thanks.
Regards Leo
Now, granted I'm not a physicist, but the experimental evidence for special relativity seems to be very high. My point was that a lot of people on these forums seem to want to reject relativity because it may have counter-intuitive consequences, but intuition is not a guide to reality. You have to go where the observations and the experiments take you, not where intuition takes you, and that was my fundamental point.