masudr said:
isn't very helpful, is it?
Most of what humans know they know on the basis of what other humans tell them. So the most natural argument in favor of one version of relativity over another is to find out what the experts say. The original developers of these things understood them at great depth (in the context of physics at that time) and could explain the differences between the accepted theories and the rejected theories at a depth that the students of the students of the students of their students cannot. Like how to make a buggy whip, the knowledge is mostly lost.
When humans want to know something, they look to the opinions of the experts. When the experts disagree, humans look for the most famous of the experts or the majority of the opinion. This tends to suppress the alternatives even if the choice is a matter of preference, not proof. Over the long term, the inevitable tendency is to turn majority opinions into near unanimous opinions that then become accepted as "facts".
The alternative would be to complicate the education of students by presenting them with a bunch of different equivalent alternatives. Instead, students tend to get taught one way of doing things, and the majority opinion is reinforced. A great example of this is the recent history of string theory.
The original participants in the debates, who understood both sides of the subject very deeply (in the context of physics as it was then known) typically retain their beliefs whether they agree with the mainstream opinion or not. As time goes on, this makes physicists on the losing side of these arguments more and more out of sync with the rest of the community. Eventually they die and their version of physics mostly dies with them.
But from a sociological point of view, the important thing to note is that these conflicts were decided not by pure logic, but instead by a sort of majority decision making that crowded out alternative thinking, combined with the mortality of the human race. In addition, as one majority or the other gets control of universities, they will prevent those with the alternative view from obtaining tenure. See Woit's new book, "Not Even Wrong" for the string theory history, or Smolin's new book, "The Trouble with Physics".
As time goes on, there will always be a few people who rediscover the obsolete alternative. Sometimes things have changed in physics so that the obsolete view looks more attractive. This is the case with the versions of relativity that included an ether. As an example, buy Bohm & Hiley's book, "The Undivided Universe" and read chapter 12.
If you want to understand the foundations of physics, not just in relativity but also in quantum mechanics, field theory, etc., below the "shut up and calculate" level, you can either go read the original sources (as suggested in the Wikipedia article), or you can hunt around for the very few modern histories of the subject.
But it should be noted that if you ask the vast majority of physicists their opinions on these things they will tell you that you are wasting your time. The vast majority of physicists treat physics as a set of formulas that one manipulates in order to obtain interesting new results. Most physicsts do not question the formulas any more than most engineers question the formulas they use in their work. Most physicists do not have the intellectual inclination or ability to question the founding principles of physics any more than most engineers can question the founding principles that they use. Shut up and calculate.
Carl
