Christian,
Thanks again for your kind comments on my essay. I haven't had time to read yours in detail yet (and I'm neurotic about saying much unless I do), but already appreciate that you address specific experimental results and predictions in light of particular theoretical expectations and critiques. That adds more than generalizations and philosophizing can do on their own. Note this curious irony: you correctly say that GR (now celebrating its 100th anniversary, so an apt time for your essay) is a geometrical theory. That constrains its form and predictions in certain ways. Yet you boldly assert that most physicists have missed an important insight, in their handling of clock synchronization on the rotating disk (all this I am gathering from your abstract alone.) How could this be?
Well if you are right, it means there are subtle problems of framing issues in this area - like the problems dogging quantum mechanics and relativistic dynamics (such as arguments about the right-angle lever and the "energy current", how is angular momentum conserved in Thomas Precession, etc.)Well if you are right, it means there are subtle problems of framing issues in this area - like the problems dogging quantum mechanics and relativistic dynamics (such as arguments about the right-angle lever and the "energy current", how is angular momentum conserved in Thomas Precession, etc.) I already know, from e.g. reading works like Relativistic Kinematics by Henri Arzeliès, about the problem of synchronizing clocks on a rotating disk (as well as about the problems of stress due to changing length standards, such as Herglotz stresses - how many physicists today heard about that?) One way is to go ahead and pretend one can use ordinary Einstein synchronization for any local section of the disk - but then "cheat" by having a scheme analogous to the International Date Line at some point when the discrepancies must meet somewhere (as noted by Arzeliès) on the disk.
The other approach is to take simultaneity as being set by a signal from the center portion of the disk, which sets the time standard the same as the lab frame. Physical character of velocity is of course the same either way (such as the kinetic energy of parts of the disk, or the rate of time observed for clocks carried on the rim, per time dilation of the moving points as in the "twin paradox" (BTW I strongly recommend Leslie Marder's Time and the Space Traveler on the TP - out of print but avail. on Amazon. He discusses the controversy of how well one can regard the traveling twin's youth in terms of the relative gravitational fields.) Nevertheless, these two approaches do not use the same standard of simultaneity, so how can we develop consistent physics for the rotating disk? This is surely one of the questions you tackle.
I'll have more to say later about some details of your argument. Regards.
