John232 said:
Finally, you state that you actually know something about physics. So why ask me, if you already know? Is there a point to all this?
The point of these forums is to teach people who want to learn physics. I didn't make that rule but I follow it.
John232 said:
If you can prove that you can't measure the distance a photon has traveled, then you would have proved that relativity itself is wrong because it does the same thing.
I never said you couldn't measure the distance a photon travels, where'd you get that idea? I just said in post #67:
ghwellsjr said:
All measurements of the speed of light involve a round-trip for the light so that the two fast electronic circuits that I described earlier are located at the same place, at the photon gun. So the gun shoots a photon and starts the timer. The photon hits a reflector some measured distance away and a photon returns. This photon hits the second detector and stops the timer. Now we can calculate the "average" speed of light. It turns out that this value is a constant equal to c as long as the experiment is inertial. But we cannot know whether it took the same amount of time for the photon to travel from the gun to the reflector as it took for the photon to travel from the reflector back to the detector colocated with the gun.
John232 said:
So then what makes you think you can disprove 100 years of accepted physics? I find it upsetting to work hard in thinking about how to solve many of the problems faced in physics and then find an answer, just to have someone insult me the whole time about it. I tried as hard as I could to explain it well enough to make someone else understand it, but apperently it takes two geniuses to create new science, one to figure it out and another to say yes that is right.
Huh? Why do you think I'm trying to disprove 100 years of accepted physics? I'm trying to help you learn it. You're the one that wants to publish your own theory of Special Relativity, not me. I'm trying to dissuade you from that endeavor. Einstein is pretty much accepted as a genius by a great many other people that I would also consider to geniuses. What other geniuses are you talking about here? Do you see yourself in the role of a genius creating new science? Is that why you want to publish your own theory of Special Relativity?
John232 said:
Yes, the wiki article does not say that Einstein is measuring the time it takes for the light to go from clock 1 to clock 2 as you have been claiming. Rather it says τ
1 is the time on clock 1 at the start of the light pulse and τ
2 is the time on the same clock 1, not clock 2, after it has been reflected back, in other words, he is measuring the round-trip time of the light pulse. He also records the time on clock 2 when the light was reflected. Then he calculates the average of those two times measured on clock 1 and sees how far off the recorded time on clock 2 was from the average. He makes an adjustment to clock 2 (this is where he sets the time on clock 2). Now clock 2 should be synchronized to clock 1. If he repeats the experiment and if he did everything right the first time, then the second time, clock 2 should display the average of the two times on clock1 and he can now say, by definition--not by measurement, that the time it takes for light to go from clock 1 to clock 2 equals the time it takes for the light to go from clock 2 to clock 1. You should not think of the process of synchronization as a way to discover the truth about the speed of light but rather as a way of creating truth about the speed of light.
John232 said:
He finds that you can add time 1 and time two and multiply it by one half. This only takes the average of the two times. Like you would find the avearge velocity in Newtons equations, for this to be true the velocity would have had to have been the same both ways. It is just a lot ado about nothing.
It's not much ado about nothing. It's the foundation of Special Relativity and without Einstein's insight into the fact that until and unless you create the meaning of the time on clock 2, it can have no meaning. After he makes that definition, then you can conclude that the light takes the same amount of time to go both directions but only in that one frame of reference for which the definition holds true. In another frame of reference with its own application of the definition, the time it takes for light to get from clock 1 to clock 2 is not the same as it is for the light to get back from clock 2 to clock 1.
John232 said:
It would be like telling Isaac Newton that his theory's of motion didn't mean anything because he can't prove that it works the same both ways...
According to Albert Einstein's prescription from 1905, a light signal is sent at time from clock 1 to clock 2 and immediately back, e.g. by means of a mirror. Its arrival time back at clock 1 is . This synchronisation convention sets clock 2 so that the time of signal reflection is .[1]
This is incomplete so I don't know what you are saying here.
But the bottom line is that anytime you want to measure how long it takes for light to go from point A to point B with two different clocks, you have to first synchronize those two clocks via round-trip light signals that are assumed to travel at the same speed in both directions and therefore take the same time in both directions, then, of course, you will "measure" the speed of light to be the same in both directions, how could it be otherwise?
This whole discussion is a result of your rejection of the wikipedia article on time dilation in its explanation of a light clock based on Einstein's definition of remote time in a Frame of Reference and the constant speed of light, and your insistence that there was a better way in which you could measure the one-way speed of light apart from previously defining it.