Cool. Thanks for letting me know I'd taken it wrong. Text is an awful medium for transmitting attitudes, and every now and then somebody takes offense who oughtn't.
Back to the thread...
What if time dilation is not the only way to explain the results of the experiments you mention here?
http://www2.rideau.net/gaasbeek/spap5.html
I feel for the poor guy. New ideas are rarely taken seriously if they stand in the face of "what is known". It's part of what makes revolution so difficult.
However, I also think he has probably changed his mind since writing that paper. Either that, or he doesn't do much research. Or he's a crackpot.
The reason I'm so certain on this one is the GPS satellite network. Before it was launched, there was actually quite a lot of heated debate over whether or not time dilation would be an issue or even exist. They knew how to correct for it, but didn't know for an absolute certainly that they would have to. (More accurately, some scientists knew for a fact they would need to correct for it and other scientists knew for a fact that they wouldn't need to.)
To settle the matter and avoid further delays, they built in the correction algorhythms, but left them turned off. After launch, they could observe if they were needed or not, and turn them on if necessary.
The effect was astonishingly powerful. Their onboard atomic clocks gained 38 microseconds per day. That's 38,000 (yes, thirty-eight thousand) nanoseconds on a system that requires a clock accuracy of just 20-30 nanoseconds. The effect is that the system gets off by about 10 kilometers per day. Without adjustments, the whole thing would be utterly worthless very quickly.
The gentleman that wrote that paper would be hard pressed to explain that with his theories, I think.
W
