http://phys.org/news/2012-04-physicists-abolish-fourth-dimension-spac... "To illustrate the difference between the two views of time, Sorli and Fiscaletti consider an experiment involving two light clocks. Each clock's ticking mechanism consists of a photon being reflected back and forth between two mirrors, so that a photon's path from one mirror to the other represents one tick of the clock. The clocks are arranged perpendicular to each other on a platform, with clock A oriented horizontally and clock B vertically. When the platform is moved horizontally at a high speed, then according to the length contraction phenomenon in 4D spacetime, clock A should shrink so that its photon has a shorter path to travel, causing it to tick faster than clock B. But Sorli and Fiscaletti argue that the length contraction of clock A and subsequent difference in the ticking rates of clocks A and B do not agree with special relativity, which postulates that the speed of light is constant in all inertial reference frames. They say that, keeping the photon speed the same for both clocks, both clocks should tick at the same rate with no length contraction for clock A."
Bravo, Sorli and Fiscaletti! Now you will have to resolve the following "paradoxes" which, if there is no length contraction, are just Einsteinian idiocies:
http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/physics/Relativity/SR/barn_pole.html "These are the props. You own a barn, 40m long, with automatic doors at either end, that can be opened and closed simultaneously by a switch. You also have a pole, 80m long, which of course won't fit in the barn. (...) If it does not explode under the strain and it is sufficiently elastic it will come to rest and start to spring back to its natural shape but since it is too big for the barn the other end is now going to crash into the back door and the rod will be trapped IN A COMPRESSED STATE inside the barn."
http://www.quebecscience.qc.ca/Revolutions Stéphane Durand: "Ainsi, une fusée de 100 m passant à toute vitesse dans un tunnel de 60 m pourrait être entièrement contenue dans ce tunnel pendant une fraction de seconde, durant laquelle il serait possible de fermer des portes aux deux bouts! La fusée est donc réellement plus courte. Pourtant, il n'y a PAS DE COMPRESSION matérielle ou physique de l'engin."
http://www.parabola.unsw.edu.au/vol35_no1/vol35_no1_2.pdf "Suppose you want to fit a 20m pole into a 10m barn. (...) Hence in both frames of reference, the pole fits inside the barn (and will presumably shatter when the doors are closed)."
http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/Hbase/Relativ/bugrivet.html "The bug-rivet paradox is a variation on the twin paradox and is similar to the pole-barn paradox.....The end of the rivet hits the bottom of the hole before the head of the rivet hits the wall. So it looks like the bug is squashed.....All this is nonsense from the bug's point of view. The rivet head hits the wall when the rivet end is just 0.35 cm down in the hole! The rivet doesn't get close to the bug....The paradox is not resolved."
Harvey Brown believes that length contraction is more fundamental than the constancy of the speed of light. It is because bodies in motion contract longitudinally that "light is measured to have the same speed in each inertial frame":
http://www.scribd.com/doc/64105541/The-Origins-of-Length-Contraction Harvey Brown: "The FitzGerald-Lorentz (FL) hypothesis was of course the result of a somewhat desperate attempt to reconcile the null result of the 1887 Michelson-Morley (MM) experiment with the hitherto successful Fresnel-Lorentz theory of a stationary luminiferous ether, a medium through which the earth is assumed to move with unappreciable drag. The MM experiment is rightly regarded today as one of the turning points in physics, and although it is discussed widely in textbooks, it is remarkable how much confusion still surrounds its structure and meaning. In order then to understand the FL hypothesis, it is necessary first to go over some welltrodden ground; sections 2 and 3 below are designed to show what the 1887 null result does and does not imply. In particular it is shown in section 3 that IN THE CONTEXT OF A THEORY OF LIGHT IN WHICH THE LIGHT-SPEED IS INDEPENDENT OF THE SPEED OF THE SOURCE, A CERTAIN MOTION-INDUCED DEFORMATION OF RIGID BODIES, OF WHICH CONTRACTION IS A SPECIAL CASE, IS REQUIRED."
http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/archive/00001661/01/Minkowski.pdf Harvey R. Brown and Oliver Pooley: "One then appeals to the relativity principle again - the principle entails that these coordinated contractions and dilations must be exactly the same function of velocity for each inertial frame, along with the principle of spatial isotropy, in order to narrow down the deformations to just those encoded in the Lorentz transformations. What has been shown is that rods and clocks must behave in quite particular ways in order for the two postulates to be true together. But this hardly amounts to an explanation of such behaviour. Rather things go the other way around. It is because rods and clocks behave as they do, in a way that is consistent with the relativity principle, that light is measured to have the same speed in each inertial frame."
So according to Harvey Brown "No length contraction" implies "The speed of light does depend on the speed of the light source".
Usually Divine Albert's Divine Theory requires that rods contract (so that Einsteinians can gloriously trap an 80m pole inside a 40m barn) but sometimes it requires that rods stretch. In the famous bug-rivet paradox the rivet shank should become as long as necessary and mercilessly squash the bug. Einsteinians have been singing "Divine Einstein" and "Yes we all believe in relativity, relativity, relativity" for hours but the bug's death makes the ecstasy uncontrollable: Einsteinians tumble to the floor, start tearing their clothes and go into convulsions:
http://brianclegg.blogspot.com/2011_11_01_archive.html Brian Clegg: "Here's the scenario. We've got a table with a 10mm deep hole in it. At the bottom of the hole a beetle is happily beetling about, unaware that we are about to fire a rivet into the hole. The good news is that the shank of the rivet, the bit that will go into the hole, is only 8mm long, leaving room for our (rather small) beetle to feel safe and snug. (...) Let's follow the event from the beetle's viewpoint. Down comes the rivet and slams into the table. At the moment before the impact the rivet is still just 5mm long as far as the bug is concerned. But here's the thing. Just because the head of the rivet has come to a sudden stop doesn't mean the whole rivet does. A wave has to pass along the rivet to its end saying 'Stop!' The end of the rivet will just keep on going until this wave, typically travelling at the speed of sound, reaches it. That fast-moving end will crash into the beetle long before the wave arrives. It will then send a counter wave back up the rivet and after a degree of shuddering will eventually settle down as an 8 mm rivet in a 10 mm hole. Too late, though, for that bug. Isn't physics great?"
http://math.ucr.edu/~jdp/Relativity/Bug_Rivet.html John de Pillis Professor of Mathematics: "In fact, special relativity requires that after collision, the rivet shank length increases beyond its at-rest length d."
