Light has no acceleration or decelleration. It is always at speed. If you view light as traveling linearly in a straight line, much as we travel to traverse distance, this would be like you getting into your car and going from zero to 60 in no time. You would either travel at 60 or 0 with no speeds in between. In other words light is at speed and is in fact defined at speed.
So light must already be at speed when it is released. It would appear then that light obtains its speed in place. Spinning objects obtain speeds in place. A merry go round attains a speed in place. If one of the carousel horses suddenly flew off the merry go round it would fly off initially at the speed of its rotation. If it were in free and empty space it would continue at that speed until or unless it encountered something that changed it. WE could measure the carousel horse's speed because we could see it as it passes by. If a horse flew off at every revolution of the merry go round we could also measure the speed by the number of horses traveling by per unit time. We could say 1 horse per second or two horses per second etc. Then if a horse was 8 feet long from nose to tail we could say it's speed is 8 feet per second. 1 horse per second would be its frequency. 8 feet would be the partial length of one complete cycle it traveled. It would also be the length between cycles or what we call wavelength. The idea that light travels at a single speed has caused much physical error. We have the belief that images of objects must travel to our eyes to be seen. Like sound must travel to our ears to be heard. There is a great distinction between the two. Sound requires a medium. Light travels best in a vacuum. Where sound is a vibration on a medium, light displaces itself to travel. Once the source of the sound ceases the sound will still travel through the medium independent of its source. I say that light will cease to travel immediately as soon as its source ceases to emit. We can put this to a test. For example we could conduct an experiment using a large array of mirrors or perhaps ordered reflection points inside a molecule or atom where I say the pulse of light will travel only the distance allowed by its timed duration. Any observer will fail to detect the light pulse at any greater distance. This may be true for mechanical detectors of EMR as well, but that is a different case. The measure of the speed of light in free space is independent of the motion of its source and of the motion of the observer. A consequence of this is the postulate that all observers will measure lightspeed the same, regardless of their motion or of the motion of the source. While we can say that all observers will measure lightspeed the same, we cannot say that they will each measure the same frequency and wavelength, all conditions as above. In fact the motion of the source and detector is accounted for by the variance in the respective observers measure of frequency and wavelength. Einstein used this or never considered it when he declared that traveling to an object is identical to an object traveling to you. Therefore it can be defined either way. This is the basis for his uniform gravitational field which heralded many expansion of matter theoiies thereafter. In other words the reason all objects fall at the same rate is because the planet expands to meet the object at a specific rate. Combine this with the idea that light speed is measured the same by all observers and you have a core of the present day physics intellectual mire. Consider the foolishness these notions have spawned. We believe that if the Sun stopped emitting EMR we would still see the Sun for the time it took the EMR to get here. I say that we are only measuring the speed of emission. Because we detect 4 horses per second does not mean we are viewing the horses being emitted at the Sun 8 minutes after they were emitted. If the Sun stopped emitting the horses no more would travel by us. The horses are being displaced by the horses. EMR is being displaced by EMR. We measure the frequency of emission at the source or at the destination. Further, the act of local measure destroys or reflects the arriving light. Stop the displacement and you stop the motion. On the other hand you can aim a burst of energy at the moon and time its distance of travel to the moon and back and so base your theory on groundless comparisions. When we send such a signal it must have a duration to allow it to reach the moon and perhaps the journey back to the source. Lightspeed is a misnomer anyway. Light is a sensory quantity. Electromagnetic radiation or EMR is the physical quantity. Just because the speeds are the same does not mean that they are the same and interchangeable in meaning. The functionality of the Lorentz transformation equation results from the ceiling on lightspeed and not from the constancy of lightspeed measure. A postulate is an assumed truth. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Epistemology" group. To post to this group, send email to epistemology@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to epistemology+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/epistemology?hl=en.