Abstract

Special relativity was based on the theorem that time is affected by motion. Einstein's proof of this was an imaginary experiment with clocks, using light as a synchronizing signal. He has said that the kind of signal was immaterial. Subsequent interpreters have stated that sound signals could just as well have been used. Today any airplane passenger's watch denies Einstein's mathematics, had he used sound. The Lorentz-Einstein transformation equations in which the speed of sound is substituted for the speed of light are unthinkable. But if they do not hold with sound as the signal, no more do they with light, for the process is identical. The transformation equations for space are based on the variability of time, and are therefore likewise denied