Posted: Feb 09, 2017 6:13 pm
DavidMcC wrote:LjSpike wrote:
I'll explain the experiment I thought up, as I see it being very unclear in that first paragraph. Lets say you can ignore the influence of gravity on spacetime, and can ignore interference caused by an observer. If you fire, lets say many muons, and you fired them in different directions, the muon which decays first is moving the slowest. The muons moving faster experience time slower, therefore last for "longer", which is an observable property. So, then you have the direction your whole system is moving in, if you then fire many muons in that direction, at varying speeds, the muons that again, decay first, could be concluded to being closest to being stationary. You wouldn't be able to know the exact speed of them, but could fairly accurately determine the direction and speed your experiment is moving in, and the accuracy would improve with the more muons you fire.
I suspect the increase of mass of a particle once it approaches the speed of light could also be used to measure speed, in a similar type of setup.
Obviously, its fairly hard to actually carry out this experiment, as you'd have to accurately fire muons, ensure you could accurately measure when they decayed, and would somehow have to determine the effect gravity is having on the experiment. Potentially it could be carried out on a larger scale, with atomic clocks fired into space? That setup would be quite costly though, and again, tricky to control the experiment.
The experiment is defective, partly because no particle (including muons) decays after an exact time in any frame of reference.
Also, particle masses cannot be used to determine absolute speed. You need to study special relativity better than you apparently have.
Furthemore, the very existence of an absolute frame of reference implies that there is a centre to the universe, which is not the case.
I admit, my special relativity knowledge isn't spectacular, however your final point of there not being a centre of the universe I would dispute. The big bang was a single infinitesimally small point, from which the universe expanded out of. That starting point would therefore be the centre of the universe?
Perhaps an alternative way of measuring, rather than the lifetime of muons, would be to launch atomic clocks in different directions? It would still be measuring the dilation of time.