David H. Burns schrieb:
> Yes and I used to think that it was Einstein who showed the velocity of 
> light to be constant
> in all frames of reference. But it wasn't he started with that. I was 
> not able to find where
> this idea actually came from. Any ideas?

Been around a while. People looking for the "aether" though which light 
waves  were assumed to propagate, by measuring subtle changes in the 
difference of c depending on direction (a) parallel to the earth's 
movement on its orbit and (b) orthogonal to it, found that these subtle 
changes were apparently... well, /very/ subtle indeed. Actually too 
subtle to be measured, if there were any at all. At any rate, "aether" 
theory would have predicted a lot more.

That's how this whole "no absolute frame of reference" thing started.

By the way, Einstein did /not/ show that light was travelling at 
constant speed - that was Maxwell - nor did he show that this was the 
case for every frame of reference - that was the experimenters (who 
didn't really show it for /every/ frame of reference of course, but for 
enough FoR to provide reason enough to seriously toy around with this idea).

All Einstein did was do just that: Take the "c appears to be constant in 
all frames of reference" as a given for argument's sake, and see what 
weird predictions he'd wind up with.

It was only the experimenters who showed that Einstein was right in his 
predictions, and therefore it is prudent to assume that he was also 
right in his initial presumptions.

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