Is there any experiment or observation disproving preferred frame of reference?

Yes. And I would not say that during these 10 years there was already a clear preference for the spacetime interpretation.

 

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I would say that the history disagrees with you.

There's like 10 pages of peoples' reactions to/expansion of it in the few years after he published it shown here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_special_relativity#Early_reception
A key quote:

It is fair to say that SR exploded the physics world when it was introduced.

In terms of timeline, Ultron's claim that fame motivated SR's acceptance is closer to being true than your claim that SR wasn't accepted before GR was published!

 

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May be - I'm not a historian.

Whatever, at that time there was no serious scientific argument to prefer this interpretation. More a question of fashion or so.

 

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People say this shit like there was no other person working on relativity theory. There were dozens of physicists and philosophers thinking very hard about relativity theory. And GR still didn't get serious academic respect within physics until the 60s.

 

That's wrong too. Even setting aside that Lorentz's theory was riddled with errors that later matching to SR helped fix, it is still a serious scientific argument that a theory that does NOT require a magical invisible purple unicorn residing in your garage is better than one that does.

 

The error in Lorentz' paper was corrected by Poincare, no necessity for Einstein here.

And don't forget that SR also requires a magical invisible purple unicorn - a four-dimensional spacetime. Anyway, it remains an interpretational, metaphysical argument. The failure to find an ether theory of gravity was, instead, a strong physical argument against the ether.

 

SR requires 4D spacetime like every other attempt at physics for 3 spatial dimensions over time. Sigh.

 

No. Classical physics requires only a 3D space. And something in it changing in time. If you want to describe its history, you would need some data about space and time when the various events happen. But it does not mean that there exist a fatalistic 4D spacetime which contains not only everything which has happened, but even everything which will happen in future.

In the spacetime interpretation, this 4D object has to exist. A 3D object which only changes is incompatible with the spacetime interpretation.

 

A four-dimensional space-time is a strictly mathematical framework. It isn't something extra and unnecessary, like the aether. It's like suggesting that if I draw a picture on a piece of graph paper and you draw the same picture on a blank piece of paper, that the grids on mine are somehow part of the drawing and extra. They aren't.

That's a self contradiction (physical /= theoretical), but I think it does imply what drives you:

Is that what your research is about? And are you hoping that through that work, to make the unicorn detectable?

Here's my perception/suspicion: ether theorists don't really believe SR and LET are interchangeable and as such they try to build theories to resurrect the 19th century aether. And per the OP's admission, that means (sadly) these efforts are doomed to be wrong before they are even finished being developed.

I guess the alternative would be that you are trying to develop a theory that doesn't do anything that GR doesn't already do, but are hoping that people will prefer it because they find it aesthetically pleasing. If that's the case, that might even be sadder since your misunderstanding of the history of SR's acceptance means you don't realize that the choice you would offer has already been rejected.

 

This is a quite modern position. Of course, quite popular, after the violation of Bell's inequality has shown that realism is dead if one wants to save relativity.

But at that time realism was not yet rejected, and there is a quite famous fatalistic quote from Einstein after the death of a friend, of type we physicists know that this flow of time is only an illusion.

Feel free to describe reality in the spacetime interpretation in a different way. I don't know a way where reality does not consist of a whole 4D object known as the block universe. And this block universe is clearly extra and unnecessary.

No. Any statement is theoretical anyway. Purely observational statements are a fantasy of empiricism with no relevance in modern scientific methodology. The word "physical" in this context means not completely metaphysical, somehow related to observable things.

First, SR and LET are not completely interchangeable. In SR + realism or causality you can prove Bell's inequality, in LET + realism and causality not.

Then, I do not try to resurrect the 19th century aether, I have already created a completely new ether theory, which gives, on the one hand, the Einstein equations of GR, and, on the other hand, the fermions and gauge fields of the SM of particle physics, together with some scalar fields. No interest at all in 19th century aether. The theory is already published in a peer-reviewed journal, Foundations of Physics.

First of all, I do not care about what some fundamentalists have already rejected or accepted, nor if this happened 100 years ago, nor 2000 years ago.

Those who reject the Lorentz ether have to reject realism and causality to preserve their ideology. Once someone agrees to reject realism and causality to preserve his belief, there is nothing one can do with him, this is already a hopeless case. He may remain a reasonable scientist in other domains, given that he does not take this rejection of realism and causality too seriously, but agrees to follow them in usual science, but for fundamental physics he is a hopeless case.

And, last but not least, the question is not about being aesthetically pleasing. This would be a minor additional point. The point is that known problems of fundamental physics are solved. Like quantization of gravity, which becomes a non-problem in an ether approach. And the explanation of the properties of the SM.

 

Galileo proved there was no preferred frame of reference while on a boat, when an object fell straight down even though the boat was moving. If there was a preferred frame, the object would have fell at an angle. He then developed Galilean Relativity, because of his "new" discovery.

 

Bad news for you: there is no such animal as a proof for a general scientific principle. At best, you can falsify it by an observation which is in contradiction with the theory.

This in no way diminishes Galileo's results. It simply corrects a misrepresentation of these results.

 

Sorry for responding so late, my computer crashed.

I have searched for the definition of "preferred frame of reference", but cannot find it. Could you provide a link that explains exactly what that specific term means?

The closest definition I found was on wiki,

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preferred_frame

After reading that I don't see where my original post is specifically in conflict with wiki. Can you expand on your rejection of my simplification of the OP question.[/quote]