That's what they tell us. Light can travel through a vacuum with nothing in it. And maybe so but what is the evidence?
So I looked up the best vacuum on planet Earth. It contains 2.5 million molecules of air per cubic cm. This is said to replicate conditions between stars. So how then can we say we've ever tested light waves going through "nothing". We haven't.
To test the validity of my suspicions I've asked the science guys on reddit if they have an answer for this. The first few responses have already been hostile and that usually indicates this is one of those issues they simply don't have a good answer for. I was very polite in my question btw, so no I didn't provoke anybody, this is all on them.
We'll see how it goes. I'm open to a good explanation of why this is a valid test, but this light has 2 million molecules to interact with ever cubic cm it propagates, so you didn't rule out matter.
Just scale it by, a factor, say 10 million to get a clue how sparse it is.
Average size of oxygen, nitrogen and argon is around 0.3nm.
2.5 million molecules of 0.3nm size in volume of cubic cm is like 2.5 million 3mm balls in a volume of 1 million cubic km.
Obviously, it is just 5 (five) 3mm balls per 2 cubic kilometers.
It will be very tricky to even purposedly find at least one 3mm ball out of five in a 2 cubic kilometers. Not talking about accidental interaction during crossing that volume by straight line.
That sounds logical. But doesn't this assume light has to "touch something"?
Light is a time varying electric and magnetic field. I wonder what interactions it could be having at a distance with matter.
Looking at MMX in a vacuum tube. If this large number of very spaced out particles is imparting it's net velocity onto the light through action at a distance, then this could explain the light beams staying in phase. That explanation would render Einstein and Lorentz's explanations unnecessary.
It still doesn't account for any successful predictions of clock slowing by Lorentz, but it's a start.
Not really. Since it is EM wave too, there can be all that difraction things, but atoms are much smaller than light wavelength, so all that stuff will be negligeable.
You will have exactly same "clock slowing" for speed of sound if you will observe moving object time with sound waves.
Lorenz is not specific to the speed of light. In Lorenz transforms you have speed of obtaining information, and that's all. Cool stuff, really, that allows to revert effects of finite speed of receiving observation information to get how things really go in moving frames.
I'd have to look at the equations for what they are actually correcting for in GPS to see if what you're saying is how these equations are used. But today is not that day.
GPS don't need any corrections, really. It is a differential system, not absolute, so relativistic effects if any just cancelled. Military was not 100% sure that relativity theory is valid, so designed system so, that no relativity corrections are necessary.