Eckard
Thank you for trying, I hope you will persist. I do understand, as I moved far away from complex maths as a matter of principle long ago so we reside far apart, yet that can make interaction very rich. As I said to Edwin, we are looking at the same mountain from different sides, that means between us we see more than we ever could alone.
I wholly agree with and support your two main notions. I believe it really is that simple, local and real.
As a quick explanation of mine; A glass of beer or plasma has a non zero refraction co-efficient 'n' so light goes through it at c/n, and is diffracted.
If we slide it down the bar at v, c/n is invariant in the frame of the beer, so if we stay on our stool we'd see the rate light passes through it as apparently c/n v. (or -v). (We don't need the Lorentz Transformation LT as we're only seeing scattered light from the beer/plasma particles, and we're not seeing object reality). If we slide with the beer it passes our frame at a different apparent rate.
If we're moving faster than the glass we need to use a negative number to describe the apparent change. in other words there are infinitely many inertial frames and none of them give us concrete object reality so we don't need the LT, but we can add and subtract.
The physics are the same in the LHC pipe, where it's photoelectrons doing the diffraction (bending and delaying) and in the plasmasphere round a body or group of bodies in space, where it does a pretty cool impression of curved space time, achieving the same results, but also explaining all the anomalies, like 3 year lensing delays!- flat gravitational curves, Pioneer/flyby etc etc.
Because ALL bodies have a local 'fine structure' field there are "infinite-simally" many. All having a local background frame. this is the point where you need to think in pictures and visualise moving frames with frames, with frequency and wavelength transforming at the cloud, shock and halo boundary zones. I've posted a stack of papers elsewhere covering all angles, here's another; Xing-Hao Y, Quiang L. Gravitational lensing analysed by the graded refractive index of a vacuum J. Opt. A: Pure Appl. Opt. 10 075001.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1088/1464-4258/10/7/075001
And Steve; I've stumbled upon a central role for rotating spheres. I tried the predictive power of discrete fields on one of the main problems in the cosmos, galactic secular evolution. It threw the answer straight back, and it was via the rotating plasma-sphere that hangs around the spent super massive fast rotating black hole (spinning Tokamak/toroid quasar) had finished spitting out the last bits of galaxy in it's plasma jets.
A Tokamak has intrinsic rotation and it starts to rotate on the new perpendicular axis, but WITH the whole plasmasphere. There are some great Hubble shots. This starts the sequence with an open barred spiral, and a whole recycling process falls into place, ending with a tidal ring and a new quasar. this solves re-ionisation and has massive implications, no less that the big bang as a scaled up version! powered by a a previous universe. And, considering infinity, there must also be life after death. (paper now submitted)
And Eckard I really do thank you for your advice, which I shall try to better follow.
Peter