>>14407593>The usual line from Nathan is something along the lines of "Einstein mentions an observer in his postulates but doesn't give a mechanism on how to observe"Nathan here. I've never said that. My position is, and always has been, that special relativity is nothing more than Doppler shift. You can see a very condensed geometric proof of this here:
>>14406625I've posted this proof several times already and no one really comments on it. I thought I was making my point as clearly as possible, but apparently not.
The summarized version is this: The Michelson-Morley experiment attempted to detect a fringe shift based on the (correct) deduction that if the laboratory was moving with respect to the aether, one of the arms (usually taken to be the vertical arm) would correspond to a longer flight path than the other. Thus, they expected that this difference in propagation time would translate to an observable interference pattern.
Their mistake, however, was that the experiment was not measuring a difference in propagation time, but a difference in *phase*. As it turns out, the wavelengths in the vertical arm contract by precisely the same factor as the extra distance that the photons are traveling. Thus, even though the propagation times are different, the phase differences cancel out and there is no observable interference.
I'm not really sure how to explain it more simply.
