<frankli...@yahoo.com> wrote in message news:1125984633.076684.215910@g47g2000cwa.googlegroups.com...
> I have been investigating the subject of special relativity and I have
> not seen a discussion about the actual behavior of atomic clocks in
> different inertial frames and how this relates to the principle of
> relativity. It looks to me like the behavior of atomic clocks in motion
> violate the basic principle of relativity in a trivial manner. I don't
> think this could have escaped the attention of scientists, so I was
> hoping to find out what is wrong with the following logic.

> >From Einstein's paper:

> http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/einstein/works/1910s/relati...

> " For owing to the alteration in direction of the velocity of
> revolution of the earth in the course of a year, the earth cannot be at
> rest relative to the hypothetical system K0 throughout the whole year.
> However, the most careful observations have never revealed such
> anisotropic properties in terrestrial physical space, i.e. a physical
> non-equivalence of different directions. This is very powerful argument
> in favour of the principle of relativity. "

> I take this as meaning that there have been no experiments which
> produce different results depending on the inertial frame that the
> experiment is contained in. So if I fire a bullet, it will
> experimentally react exactly the same, not matter what the original
> inertial frame was, so we cannot tell any difference between any
> inertial frames and there are no "special" frames with unique
> properties. Is this correct? Any experiment which does result in a
> difference would immediately falsify the principle of relativity. Is
> that correct?

> Now, there was a famous experiment by Hafele and Keating which flew
> atomic clocks on jet airliners in a west and east direction. This
> experiment was best known for confirming the accuracy of the special
> and general relativity formulas for time dialation. The experiment
> revealed that the westward clock ticked the slowest, the earth bound
> clock (not travelling) ticked faster than the westward clock and the
> eastward clock ticked the fastest. All of this was predicted by the
> formulas of special and general relativity to a remarkable accuracy.

> But wait! Didn't Einstein say that the principle of relativity required
> that the results of ANY experiment should be the same regardless of the
> direction of the inertial frame? The Hafele and Keating had 3 atomic
> clocks in 3 different inertial frames that produced 3 different
> results. Therefore, I conclude that the principle of relativity has
> been trivially falsified by the behavior of atomic clocks in differing
> inertial frames. If the principle of relativity would have been true,
> then it would have predicted that all 3 clocks would have experienced
> the same relative slowdown (which of course is impossible and was not
> the actual result of the emperical experiment).

> So, some special relativity genius please tell me why this isn't true.

> To be clear, I am not saying that the formulas describing SR effects
> are wrong, I am saying that Einstein's first postulate of the principle
> of relativity is wrong by Einstein's own description in the above
> quoted paragraph. It is quite possible for the formulas to be correct
> and the postulates to be totally wrong.

> Also, I know that the atomic clocks in this experiment were not in
> truly inertial frames. In this experiment, the center of the Earth was
> taken as the point of reference for the inertial frame. All 3 clocks
> would be in cirular motion about this point of reference. The time
> dialation calculations were based on this arrangement. You might say
> that SR/GR need not apply because the clocks are rotating about the
> Earth, but then why did the time dialation formulas work so well? No
> matter the frame in use, they did appear to act normally according to
> SR/GR formulas, so I would think it would be fully applicable. Once
> again, SR/GR formulas predict correct experimental result, while
> postulate predicts nonsense.  fhurelativity

> -Please explain