The Lorentz Ether Theory:

‘As history buffs may know, the Lorentz Ether Theory (LET) appeared a year before Einstein’s 1905 publication of SR. Of course, LET incorporated both the relativity principle (taken from Poincare, but it was first formulated about a generation earlier) and the Lorentz transformations that bear his name. The essential new element introduced by Einstein the following year was the equivalence of all inertial frames, thereby eliminating the need for the luminiferous ether. This first postulate of SR makes the Lorentz transformations reciprocal; i.e., they work equally well from any inertial frame to any other, then back again; so it has no meaning to ask which of two identical clocks in different frames is ticking slower in any absolute sense. The second postulate of SR makes the speed of light independent of not only the speed of the source (which is also true generally for waves in any medium, including luminiferous ether), but also independent of the speed of the observer (which is a feature unique to SR).

Today, many physicists and students of physics have acquired the impression that these two postulates have been confirmed by observations. However, that is not the case. In fact, none of the eleven independent experiments verifying some aspect of SR is able to verify either postulate. It is now widely believed that no experiment is capable of verifying these postulates even in principle, because they become automatically true by convention if one adopts the Einstein clock-synchronization method, and they become just as automatically false if one adopts a different synchronization convention such as the ‘universal time’ postulate of Lorentz. Of interest here is the point that the GPS uses the latter synchronization convention for pragmatic reasons ...’. (https://web.archive.org/web/20040214022609/www.dipmat.unipg.it/~bartocci/ep6/ep6-vanfl.htm).

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[1] T. Van Flandern, ‘What the Global Positioning System tells us about relativity’, in Open Questions in Relativistic Physics, F. Selleri, ed., Apeiron, Montreal, 81-90 (1998).

[2] H.A. Lorentz, Lectures on Theoretical Physics, Vol. III, ‘The principle of relativity for uniform translations’, Macmillan & Co., London, 208-211 (1931). Contains summary of and citation to original 1904 paper.

[3] H. Erlichson, ‘The rod contraction-clock retardation ether theory and the special theory of relativity’, AJP 41, 1068-1077 (1973).

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