Dear Pentcho Valev
Thank you for your critical response. You are quite right - my analysis is insufficient. Three factors contribute to that: 1- the format of the fqxi contest wanted us to ask foundational questions, and specifically discouraged 'shoehorning' our own 'pet theories' in the discussion; in other words not to give the answers! 2- the word-count limit did not allow a lengthy discussion. Most importantly 3- my conclusions are based on my 2005 Beautiful Universe Theory which is admittedly qualitative and needs mathematical development in many areas. Having said that I feel confident from thought experiments imagining how energy hops across the ether nodes, and how force on a body 'compresses' its length before it starts moving (see attached figure from the BU paper), that the equivalent of SR can be developed including reciprocal *measured* clock-time retardation, and *measured* length contraction. This becomes obvious if you think of time measured by a clock made up of a bouncing ray of light in a box whose length contracts along the way it travels.
The payoff for this way of thinking is in the great simplification of gravity, because it is not spacetime that warps so unrealistically, merely the ether medium has a density gradient, which slows down (c) as described in Q.4. As I mentioned Einstein himself later admitted that (c) has to slow down when curving in a gravity field. SR plays no role in such a situation because both the light and the star are in the same inertial frame. The required formulation of all this in (BU) should be based on discrete 'steps' between nodes, at a *maximum* speed of (c) in a vacuum free from masses and fields.
Any help translating these intuitions into more rigorous mathematical form would be welcome!
VladimirAttachment #1: 1_BUFIG26.jpg