sam, you are so off base it isn't even funny.

Sure, einstien thought the universe was fixed, in a steady state situation. However SR had NOTHING to do with that!

As for his concept of how fast things went. Thats pure BS. SR's entire purpose was to create a system for which all physical laws hold for everyone. So people going at different speeds didn't have to use different laws. This is needed because various physical laws, especially electromagnetism, said a stationary observer would see an unbroken set of magnetic field lines, while a moving one would see discontinuities (and discontinuities don't even make sense!). I.e. the laws of physics should hold for everyone, regardless of their motion or situation. Therefore they need to be re-written in a format that allows that to work.

Einstein postulated that C was relative to EVERYTHING, not just empty space. Otherwise different people could get different values for C, which would violate the expression for the speed of light derived from Maxwell's equations. I.e. their expressions for the speed of light would have to be entirely different, just because they're moving.

Classical Electrodynamics were very well understood in the 19th century, notice I said classical, which refers to the general realm of macroscopic, slow, low gravity (notice low like earths, not zero-g). Most of the experiments held were either 1) Not sensitive to gravity or 2) took that into account. Same goes for ambient magnetic and electrical fields.

As such the "enviromental" factors you rest your case on are considered, and mitigated. I.e. they found ways to make their clocks robust and accurate in the conditions at hand. What standard enviromental effect can you think of thats going to disturb an atomic clock (which is found to be accurate to 1 nanosecond per 1000 years or somesuch figure).

The "speed limit of c" was founded by Maxwell, not Lorentz.

The michelson morely experiment said a) the light was moving in a local ether around earth or b) there was no ether. It turns out to be B because A would cause difflection of starlight (and thus a stars positon would shift) as the ligth entered the non-moving ether and intot he ether that follows earth. This is analogous to how an object appears "bent" when you put it in water.

The ether you quote einstien about is not the Ether of electromagnetics. It is instead that of space-time, which he describes as being everywhere, and is a maleable medium. This space-time ether, however, does not have many of the attributes of the electromagnetic ether. Such as light is its basis, not the otherway around. It is not variations in the space-time ether that cause light. Light uses it as a medium no more than sound does.


UT, in 1905 einstien didn't consider space empty, but he did not then understand how to treat gravity, so he started with a simpler, more restriction (therefore special) relativity theory.