Dear Eckard - I have now responded to your interested paper on your page. I quote my rather hasty comments to your numbered endnotes and suggestions as follows:
1) ...there is no common time but different local times. Suggestion 1: Negative values of d or t, respectively...
VT-By requiring that all observers see things in the same way Einstein made simultaneous time impossible. If you dispense with this requirement and assume absolute time...in fact NO time, a universal state can be dealt with all over the Universe.
2) Infinitely long rigid bodies (coordinate systems) ...Suggestion 2: As already Leibniz understood for numbers, one may arbitrarily choose only one measure
VT--Well not only infinitely long, but if you take a given reference frame and make it expand to fill the entire Universe you have absolute space! In my Beautiful Universe Theory also found here I have found that there is no necessity to start with Special Relativity - why distort apace and time unnecessarily if Lorentz transformations in an absolute Universe suffice?
3) Michelson's experiment ...Lorentz, merely managed to rescue the ether hypothesis in a rather mysterious manner. Length contraction has never been directly observed. Suggestion 3: The velocity of light c equals to the distance d between the position of emitter at the moment of emission and the position of receiver at the moment of detection divided by the time of flight t: c=d/t.
VT-- I have yet to prove it, but in relation to the above theory I thought a lot and concluded that relativity 'works' in a discrete ether lattice where light speed c is a maximum but can be less if the local density increases (for example due to gravity).
4) Poincaré's method of synchronization uses a signal that is emitted from A and then reflected from B back to A. While this method is correct on condition the distance between A and B does not change, it otherwise destroys symmetry and synchrony between A and B.
Suggestion 4: Synchronization can be performed by means of clock transport. If the ABA method is preferred then the change of the distance during measurement must be known for calculating a compensation of its influence.
VT--In both cases it is clock time that changes, not time itself as a dimension. And if a meter is flown its length changes not space itself as a dimension. Spacetime in SR is an unnecessary formulation that 'works' for the wrong reason (that c is constant).
Vladimir