employee #416 said:
Heh, first year physics.

You use index of refraction in Snell's law to find the angle at which light is bent, right? This can also be interpreted as the angle at which light is absorbed and emitted from the old medium to the new medium?
Yes, the index of refraction of a medium is also the ratio of the speed of light in vacuum to the speed of light in the medium.
Hehe, Tom, you cease to amaze me. Experimental evidence relies on our eyes as a confirmation, right?
No. In fact, relativistic measurements do not involve human senses at all, but rather electronic and mechanical subsitutes. Of course, our eyes read the dials, but that's hardly relevant.
What our eyes see is not what is really happening. Just because something appears to be shorter, does not make it shorter.
If something is measured to be shorter, then it is shorter. Measurements
are what tell us what is real.
The true length is ALWAYS there.
No, it isn't. You're stuck in pre-relativistic thinking here. One thing SR teaches us is that there is no preferred frame, and there is no "real" length of objects.
Things only appear to not be there. If a color-blind person needed a ruler that was blue and said, "Pass me the green ruler." You know the ruler is blue, but the color-blind person sees it as green, because he can not distinguish between colors. Optical illusion.
This is an irrelevant argument by analogy. If you want to talk about SR, then why not just stick to SR?
Tom: Length contraction has not been measured directly, but the invariance of the speed of light has been, as has time dilation. It is not logically possible for the speed of light to be absolute and for time to not be absolute, and simultaneously have space be absolute.
416: I would seriously argue you on that statement.
And I would tell you to open a physics book and study, because this is really basic stuff.
I would really like to stay being a member on this site.
Then stop being so arrogant. You have obviously not studied physics, and here you are telling us that you can do our jobs better than we can.
Can you provide me with a link on how time dilation works and how it is derived? Lenght contraction is very well an optical illusion that people view as reality. I'm assuming the same about time dilation, but am fully knowledgeable in that area.
I repeat: In SR, neither length contraction nor time dilation are illusory. Lifeless detectors can be used to measure these effects, and they cannot be tricked the way human minds can.
Here is the original paper by Einstein:
On The Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies
This is how our eyes are at flaw of measuring things. Lorentz transformation relies on the way our eyes measure things. It takes a triangle and transforms it to come up with 4 vectors. Blah blah blah blah. So, Lorentz transformations state that an object's length contracts as it is moving at relativistic speeds. A barn LOOKS smaller when viewed from farther away, but we konw the true length is there, right? Is that not a way of saying our eyes can not measure the true size just as our eyes are unable to measure the true length of things moving at relativistic speeds?
This is completely wrong. The Lorentz transformation has nothing to do with human eyes or optical illusions. It states what is
really happening, and all experimental tests of its predictions have come out positive. If you want to be allowed to post here, then you are going to have to stop posting your opinions that are based only on your own incredulity and ignorance.