Bud,
While I differ with Akinbo as to *the aether*, I am committed to 'each to their own' both metaphysically and philosophically.
I think where there exists much misconception in regards Einstein's utterances, lies both in transliteration from the original dialect he preferred as well as the more modern idioms expressed these days. It was a century ago that most of what he said, is now interpreted from a persuasion grossly influenced by the prejudice in QM to prop up the entirely philosophic assumption of absolute time.
By *must be looked upon as real* I do not read as material, but rather existential. In the sense of a priori, lack of existence is The Void. And something which the inherent animal instinct of self preservation is simply and strictly incapable of comprehending. Really, it would not be a very successful species which could accommodate any idea of not existing in its survival instinct. Yet physically we must intellectually abstract some idea of The Void to distinguish between the material world which would include field volumes, and an absolute nothingness. It has always seemed a bit conveniently ad hoc for QM to assume absolute space and time as an infinite measure paradigm, and then say that neither is real.
In the classical mind of the era when modern relativistic thought culminated into formalized theoretical discourse, it was considered profound to embrace an idea that time and space not only were existential beyond the mathematical artifice, but mutually pliable. And by treating spacetime as existential, there is the real relationship that suggests the only difference is that which exists between the mathematically finite determinability of rectilinear measure, and the mathematically infinite indeterminability of curvilinear measure. I find it instructive of the meanings of terminology of the era to struggle with Russell, Eddington, Fitzgerald and others. It is what they meant by * choice of geometries *.
Which brings me to that point which is really at the heart of objections to modern relativity, the solution to Galileo's relativity where an object falling from the masthead of a passing ship follows both a straight line and a curved line. Something has to give, and people like to think of having all the time in the world.
The oft stated objection to SR is in the reversibility of the mathematical function inherent to any equality, and a direct application of that to physical time reversibility. (I object to that interpretation, also.) BUT, here is why... when Einstein gushed about his epiphany of imagining himself riding on a beam of light and Time *stopped*, it is only so in the experience of the hypothetical observer travelling at light velocity. So time does NOT follow a metric which would equate in the reversibility of a mathematical equality as time extending at light velocity for a body at relative rest and slowing to an extension rate of zero at light velocity. Yet that is how it commonly gets applied. Physically, where SR and GR can agree is when the time metric is recognized to be one where the closer one gets to light velocity, the nearer one is to the limit rate at which time can extend. At relative rest, time extends at a nil rate. And that is perhaps where we should look for a *quantum gravity* rationale. Cordially, jrc
