Tests of Special Relativity
to Dr Santini: My remark on special relativity having been tested rigorously was written eight years ago, before ECE2 was developed. I always encourage discussion and thank you for your comments. "I dislike arguments of any kind, they are always vulgar and often convincing" (the dogmatists of Oscar Wilde). The tests of what used to be called special relativity are well known, which does not mean that they are right, but unlike general relativity some of them are very precise, for example the weak equivalence principle and the Sagnac effect to one part in ten power twenty or more. Time dilation has been tested many times by recent experiments (one part in ten power eight at least) and particle accelerator design depends on special relativity. The Maxwell Heaviside equations are equations of what used to be called special relativity, and work in many ways, but are modified by ECE. The Coulomb law of MH for example is the most precise law in physics. There is a review of superluminal tachyon theory in my "Advances in Chemical Physics" book "Modern Nonlinear Optics", and UFT166 has become a classic on superluminal motion, having been read tens of thousands of times. That does not mean that it is right, but being hiuman i like anthropomorphic popularity. The constancy of the universal constant c does not mean that light cannot travel faster than c, or slower than c (photon mass theory) – see the Evans Morris papers. In "The Enigmatic Photon", the photon mass theory was greatly developed, the photon becomes a special relativistic particle and tachyon theory is discussed by Recami. Length contraction is more difficult to test, but there are many contemporary tests. A google lit search will find them, whether they are right or wrong. At Vigier One in Toronto there was extensive discussion on the Michelson Morley experiment. Vigier gave a lecture on it and concluded that the experiment could have given false results. In our most recent work the vacuum or aether plays a prominent role. I think that Horst Eckardt has developed his own version of special relativity. ECE2 is not special relativity, it is a generally covariant unified field theory, in which torsion and curvature are both non zero. Its field equation look like Maxwell Heaviside (MH) and its lagrangian and hamiltonian look like those of special relativity. When it comes to the mathematics of the Lorentz transform it is best in my opinion to forget about words (and it is only my opinion as Vigier would say) the best way forward is to apply P, C, T, CP, CT, CP and CPT to the Lorentz transform. There are no violations of symmetry in the U(1) sector and none in the Lorentz transform. These start to appear in the electroweak sector of the obsolete standard physics, but electroweak theory has been refuted in UFT225. So U(1) x SU(2) has been refuted. As you know there are parity violations in electroweak theory, and atoms become optically active. The transition from MH to O(3) electrodynamics occurred via B(3), and developed into ECE and ECE2. These are very powerful theories which can be adapted to deal with any data. If there are any data that definitively refute the U(1) sector of the old standard model then ECE2 can be applied to those data. Special relativity no longer exists, it has developed into ECE2 theory, it is no longer a theory of Minkowski spacetime with no torsion and no curvature. A theory that has no torsion and no curvature violates Cartan geometry.