pervect said:
I really haven't been following the argument, which has been extremely long.
I thought that Hans De Vries made an interesting point that any conductor must have a notion of simultaneity, that frame in which the electric field is zero. This is not any sort of "ether" frame, because it is attached to a physical object. However, it does suggest to me that there is yet another reason for using standard Einstein clock synchronization in any inertial frame - because it shares the same notion of simultaneity that a conductor does.
In a nutshell, after hundreds of posts "Aether"+the two sock puppets on one side and I on the other side have agreed that (see
https://www.physicsforums.com/showpost.php?p=953407&postcount=394) the correct wave vector in the Gagnon experiment is linearly dependent on the Earth composite speed (orbital and rotational) as in :
k(v_z,\omega)=\frac{v_z}{c}*\frac{\omega}{c}+... (1)
In SR, the term in v_z does not exist. IN GGT (an aether theory derived from the Mansouri-Sexl theory), the term in v_z is present.
What followed in the BAUT ("Against the Mainstream"!) forum was a disagreement as to whether one could extract the quantity (k+k')L/2 from the two waves of the form :
A*cos(kL-\omega*t) and respectively A*cos(k'L-\omega*t)
There are at least 3 ways to do exactly that : extract (k+k')L/2 . I am sure that there are more. The quantity (k+k')L/2, being dependent of v_z gives an excellent tool for separating the SR predictions from the GGT (MS) predictions and from the experimental measurements that agree with SR and disagree with GGT. ("Aether" insists on using the term (k-k')L/2 that is obviously independent of v_z)
Formula (1) "fixed" the errors in the original Gagnon paper and added it back to the list of 8 papers, published Phys. Rev. that demonstrate how to measure one-way light speed isotropy. All these experiments are executed outside the domain of applicability of the MS theory. As outlined by CM Will in his paper, this is for good reason, the MS theory STOPS at kinematics. Mansouri and Sexl never developed their theory past kinematics. Now, "Aether" please stop and contrast the MS 1977 papers with, let's say, the Einstein 1905 paper. Where is the dynamic section in MS? Where is the electromagnetic section?
If one wanted to disprove the MS theory, one had to operate in the "photon sector" (electrodynamics). The much quoted book by Y.Y.Zhang, in effect says the same thing but a little differently: MS and SR agree WITHIN the scope of kinematics ONLY. Once you take MS OUTSIDE kinematics two things (maybe more) happen:
1. One can construct electrodynamic experiments that showcase the differences between GGT(MS) and SR as in the case of Gagnon, Krisher, Will, Peters
2. One can attempt to reconcile MS with SR by ADDING AH-HOC assumptions that MAY or MAY NOT be correct (see the CM Will paper). This is perfectly in line with what we've known about "aether" theories all along : they can be made to predict the same results as SR BUT we need to ADD AD-HOC explanations for EACH new experiment. This is the main reason "aether" theories have been abandoned in the favor of SR.We all know that SR does NOT need ANY ad-hoc additional explanation. If "Aether" wanted to disprove the one way light isotropy he would have to refute all 8 papers. The above mathematical and experimental reasoning stopped him after the first one (Gagnon). It was an interesting and somewhat unique exercise of "refurbishing" a paper that had some easily correctable math errors but has a sound experimental basis.