Sunday, December 6, 2009

Beyond Relativity

The weakest assumption in the derivation of the Lorentz Transformation is Einstein's assumption that the speed of light is a universal constant. This assumption is validated by the null result of Michelson-Morley experiment. The conclusion that there is no ether may not be justified. The validity of the Lorentz Transformation suggests that the observed change to the speed of light for a given relative velocity is neglible. If this were not so naive impressionism suggests that one can still find a transformation between the two reference frames which is similar to the Lorentz Transformation. An expression for A can be found by plugging the two values for the speed of light into the formula for the addition of velocities and solving for A. One then gets the following results where Δc is the change in the observed value of the speed of light,


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