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In simplified form, atomic beam resonance involves three steps. The first is to select only those atoms in the appropriate energy level. This selection is accomplished by using a specially shaped magnetic field, which acts as a kind of filter. It allows atoms in one energy level to pass and blocks all others by bending the beam. Only atoms in the correct energy level are bent the correct amount to reach and pass through the aperture that serves as the entrance to the cavity.

The second and crucial step is to send the selected atoms into another energy level. The task is accomplished by passing the atoms through an oscillating microwave field inside a cavity. The atoms will go to another energy level only if the frequency of the applied oscillating microwaves matches their Bohr frequency.

The third step is to detect those atoms that have changed energy levels. At this point, the beam of atoms passes through another magnetic field filter, which allows only atoms in the correct energy level to strike a detector that records the atoms as current flow.

Even though you can see into the microwave oven when your food is cooking, the microwaves are effectively blocked from getting out into the room because the holes in the metal screen on the microwave oven door are about 1 mm in diameter compared to a 120 mm wavelength for the microwaves. The wavelength of the microwaves is about 120 times the size of the holes, and can't "see" the holes to get out.

The spin–flip transition occurs at a frequency of 9193 megahertz, equivalent to a “vibration” of almost 10 billion times a second. The frequency of this “clock transition” is the highest of all the alkali metals and can be measured more precisely than any of the others. It corresponds to a wavelength of 3.26 centimetres, which lies right in the middle of the microwave radio spectrum.

caesium is the biggest of all the atoms. As a more or less direct consequence of this, its outer solo electron is only loosely attached. It is easier to knock an electron off a caesium atom than any other atom, and this makes it easy to detect.

an atom or molecule with a net electric charge due to the loss or gain of one or more electrons

Because cesium is strongly photoelectric (easily loses electrons when struck by light), it is used in photoelectric cells, photomultiplier tubes, scintillation counters, and spectrophotometers. It is also used in infrared lamps

Caesium atoms are like very precisely tuned radio receivers. They will ignore passing waves of the wrong frequency but respond strongly to waves of the right frequency, namely 9193 megahertz. An atom in the lower state hit by a photon will absorb it and flip to the upper state. An atom in the upper state hit by a photon will release an identical photon and flip to the lower state. In each case the outer electron is turned over by the incoming wave and changes the state of the atom.

If a caesium atom is exposed to light of wavelength 852 nanometres, it will absorb a photon and almost immediately re-emit it again, as if the photon has bounced off the atom. Indeed, this process is known as “scattering” of light. When the atom absorbs the photon it receives a little kick of momentum in the direction the photon was travelling.  When it re-emits the photon the atom recoils with another little kick in the direction opposite to the photon’s travel. At first sight one might think that these kicks would cancel out: for every incoming photon there is an outgoing photon too. But if the atom is in a laser beam, the absorbed photons all come from the same direction while the scattered photons are sprayed out at random. The kicks do not balance out and the atom in the beam gets pushed along by the light, scattering photons as it goes

Hmm.  A wavelength of 852 nanometers puts the light just beyond the 750 nanometer edge of the visible light range and into the infrared range.

Now suppose the atom is moving towards the source of the laser light. Does it absorb photons still? No, because although the photons are the right wavelength for a stationary atom, the Doppler effect (Chapter 2) ensures that the moving atom sees them blue-shifted to a slightly shorter wavelength. The atom sees photons streaming past that are too short to be absorbed and nothing happens. But if we now adjust the wavelength from the laser to make it slightly longer than 852 nanometres, then provided we get it just right the moving atom will see these longer photons blue-shifted to 852 nanometres and begin to absorb them!

light is always propagated in empty space with a definite velocity c which is independent of the state of motion of the emitting body.

, unless some kind of feedback system changes things. 

According to my paper "What is Time?", the cesium atoms within the clock will slow their oscillation rate when they move faster and when they drop to a lower altitude.  That would mean that the microwaves will just pass through them unless the microwave emitter changes the oscillation frequency of the microwaves it emits to match the oscillation frequency of the atoms.  And that is, of course, exactly what the feedback system within the atomic clock is designed to do.

The problem is that it is very difficult to visualize exactly what is happening inside an atomic clock that is moving at high speed.  Does it make any difference how the clock is oriented?  Experimental results seem to say, no, it doesn't make any difference if the clock is moving sideways or backwards or up and down. 

If you shoot microwave photons at a stream of cesium atoms that is shooting across the path of the microwaves, do the atoms hit the photons or do the photons hit the atoms?  The photons supposedly have a length of 3.26 centimeters (1.28 inches), and they are passing in front of atoms that are 3.38 nanometers (3.38 billionths of a meter) in diameter, far too small to be seen.  It would seem that the atoms are going to be hitting the photons, not the other way around.  On the other hand, the photons are moving at the speed of light, and the atoms are just moving at the speed of an escaping gas.



The first cesium atomic clocks had the cesium atoms getting bombarded by microwave photons for the entire distance between Magnet 1 and Magnet 2.   But in 1949 Norman Ramsey of Harvard University devised the U-shaped cavity configuration shown above that is used in modern atomic clocks. (The "cavity" is evidently the microwave-filled space inside the base and arms of the U.)  On page 49 of "Splitting Time" it says this:

The caesium beam passes first through a hole in the end of one arm of the U and then through a similar hole in the other arm. At each pass through the cavity the atoms receive an identical burst of microwaves. If the frequency of the radiation corresponds to the transition frequency, the first burst puts the atoms into a ghostly quantum mixture of the two states and the second completes the transition to the opposite state. The sharpness of the transition frequency is now proportional to the length of time the atoms are coasting in limbo between the two bursts of radiation. The longer the coast, the more accurately the frequency is defined.

Because the atoms are all streaming in nearly parallel lines and because the radiation is directed at right angles to the beam, the microwaves hit the atoms from the side, so to speak, rather than head on. That means there is no Doppler shift in the wavelength of the radiation seen by the atoms and so, unlike the ammonia clock, the frequency remains sharp.

Several observatories around the world now make routine timing measurements of pulsars. The arrival times of pulses are recorded with atomic clocks to accuracies of a few microseconds, and these times are the raw data for numerous astrophysical investigations. By averaging over many years—and billions of pulses—the rotation periods can be determined to a few parts in 1014. ...

One consequence of this high accuracy is that pulsar observations are very sensitive to Doppler shifts. The speed of the Earth around the Sun, about 30 kilometres per second, causes slight changes in the apparent frequency of the pulses which show up very clearly in the timing data. When the Earth is moving towards the pulsar the pulses come more frequently than when the Earth is moving in the opposite direction. Pulsar astronomers correct their observations for the Earth’s motion as a matter of routine.

There are three relativistic effects we need to consider. The most famous of these is time dilation, summed up in the phrase, “moving clocks run slow”. A clock in an aircraft, for example, would be seen to run slow as judged by an observer on the ground. (Equally, clocks on the ground would appear to run slow as seen from the aircraft, but we do not have space in this book to discuss the subtleties of relativity!) Time dilation only becomes appreciable at speeds close to that of light—indeed at light speed time stops altogether — but with the nanosecond accuracy now possible with modern atomic clocks, time dilation has to be taken into account whenever clocks are moved.

Aside from unexpected breakdowns and interruptions for maintenance, caesium beam clocks eventually run out of caesium. It is boiled away at one end of the beam tube and transported to the other end. After running for a few years a caesium beam clock will need to be replenished.

In a collaboration between Essen and Markowitz, the relative durations of the astronomical and atomic (cesium) seconds were measured over an averaging time of 2.75 years with a final determination that the cesium frequency was 9,192,631,770.20 Hz.

The story of these measurements is nicely detailed in Splitting the Second: The Story of Atomic Time, by Tony Jones (Institute of Physics, 2000).

When I looked through my collection of physics books, I found I had that one in my collection.  It is a 199 page book that describes the workings of atomic clocks in great detail, particularly cesium atomic clocks.

My first impulse was to visually scan through it to see if it answered the question I have.  But I'm not sure what the question is that I have.  Basically, it is just something I do not fully understand.  Exactly what speeds up when an atomic clock is raised to a higher altitude?  According to mathematicians, nothing speeds up, the two clocks just take different routes through a mathematical model of spacetime that the mathematicians concocted.  But we know that if you have two identical atomic clocks in front of you, one higher than the other, the higher clock will tick faster.  They can't take different routes through a mathematical model when you have one observer watching both clocks.   So, the concocted mathematical model does not represent reality.  Reality says that the higher clock ticks faster.

Here's an illustration and text from page 135 of "Splitting the Second":

Why even have a debate when one observer can view both clocks concurrently?  All the use of different "inertial frames of reference" accomplishes in this instance is to complicate a very simple situation.  High clocks run faster than low clocks.  Period.  Inertial frames are irrelevant.

That brings us back to my original question: 

Exactly what speeds up when an atomic clock is raised to a higher altitude? 

If the entire clock speeds up, the quartz crystal microwave generator serves the same routine function at the higher altitude as at the lower altitude: it simply corrects for minor fluctuations in the quartz crystal oscillation rate due to minor unfixable imperfections in the design of the clock.  If the oscillation rate of the cesium atom increases when the clock is raised, but the quartz crystal microwave generator continues to generate microwaves at the same frequency as at the lower altitude, then the change in the oscillation frequency of the cesium atom will cause the microwave generator to generate matching microwaves.

Which is it?

It seems to me to be an easy question to answer, but no one is answering it, probably because no one else is asking it.  Here is a typical diagram for the workings of a cesium atomic clock:

Netta Hagler, who arranged the meet-up of the Flat Earthers, questioned the fact that Earth is spinning through space at 1,000 miles per hour. “But we can’t feel it. I don’t believe I’m spinning right now. No,” said Hagler.

Patricia Steere, who is one of what you might call the “stars” of today’s Flat Earth movement (which mostly orbits around YouTube), told [CBS correspondent Brook] Silva-Braga, “Probably most people who hear of it will laugh at it, think we’re idiots. But we’re not idiots; we’re intelligent people from all walks of life and all ages.”

Did we really go to the moon? “No. We didn’t go to the moon,” said Steere. “And we don’t have a rover on Mars. And we didn’t do a fly-by of Pluto. We’ve never been to space. Period. End of.”

In short, Flat Earthers don’t believe much of anything unless they see it for themselves. They believe NASA is just part of a broad conspiracy.

According to Steere, “It’s a giant game of chess. We, all of us in humanity, are the pawns. Part of the whole Flat Earth thing is keeping us locked down, not knowledgeable about who we are, who we really are as people, and what we’re capable of.”

National security expert Tom Nichols, who teaches at the Harvard Extension School, takes a dim view of Flat Earth. He told Silva-Braga he thinks something new is happening: “People have really become obsessed with the idea that, if it’s not part of their direct experience, it can’t be true.

All atoms have naturally consistent vibrational frequency (for strontium its about 430 trillion times per second) and the measurement of these movements is used to create the clock's "tick."

All commercial rubidium frequency standards operate by disciplining a crystal oscillator to the rubidium hyperfine transition of 6834682610.904 Hz.

      6,834,682,611 ticks per second for rubidium
      9,192,631,770 ticks per second for cesium
430,000,000,000,000 ticks per second for strontium

It is evident, is it not, that if you are in a space ship
going at 100,000 miles a second in some direction, while I
am standing still, and I shoot a light beam at 186,000 miles
a second through a little hole in your ship, then, as it goes
through your ship, since you are going at 100,000 miles per
second and the light is going at 186,000, the light is only
going to look to you as if it is passing at 86,000 miles a
second. But it turns out that if you do this experiment it
looks to you as if it is going at 186,000 miles a second past
you, and to me as if it is going 186,000 miles a second past
me!

The facts of nature are not so easy to understand, and the
fact of the experiment was so obviously counter to commonsense,
that there are some people who still do not believe the
result! But time after time experiments indicated that the
speed is 186,000 miles a second no matter how fast you are
moving. The question now is how that could be. Einstein
realized, and Poincare, too, that the only possible way in
which a person moving and a person standing still could
measure the speed to be the same was that their sense of
time and their sense of space are not the same, that the
clocks inside the space ship are ticking at a different speed
from those on the ground, and so forth. You might say, 'Ah,
but if the clock is ticking and I look at the clock in the space
ship, then I can see that it is going slow'. No, your brain is
going slow too! So by making sure that everything went
just so inside the space ship, it was possible to cook up a
system by which in the space ship it would look like 186,000
space-ship miles per space-ship second, whereas here it
would look like 186,000 my miles per my second. That is a
very ingenious thing to be able to do, and it turns out, remarkably
enough, to be possible.

I think it's either the fifth or sixth book by Bryson that I've read or listened to.  And it is definitely one of his best.  It's about Australia and about traveling around that country/continent/island by train, car and on foot.  It also contains a lot of history about Australia, particularly about all the people who have died exploring it.  If you don't die of thirst or sunstroke in the outback, Australia has more deadly animals, insects, snakes, fish and vermin than any other country in the world.  And yet Bryson's book makes you want to visit every corner of the country.  Even the trees are probably unlike anything you've ever seen before:



It was a highly enjoyable book, just perfect for listening to while driving back and forth in my daily routines.  And at times it was extremely funny, too.

October 11, 2018 - As I sat watching TV last night, I kept thinking about how to begin a book about time and time dilation.  If I write about arguing the subject of time and time dilation with mathematicians on the Internet, the readers will probably think I am nuts for arguing with people on the Internet.  There are all sorts of people on the Internet who claim to be experts on things which they actually know nothing about.  If you do not know exactly who you are arguing with, you cannot trust anything they say.  And, even if you do know who they are, why are they arguing on the Internet instead of discussing things with their colleagues?  The answer seems to be that their colleagues do not want to argue with them, so they take their screwball arguments onto the Internet. 

I keep trying to find some scientist who will discuss time and time dilation with me via emails or in person, but they are all too busy to have long discussions with strangers.  I began this whole "project" by taking a physics course, but that offered no way of having a discussion about things in the course that made no sense.  And the professor stated in his course that if you didn't understand or had questions about what was being taught, then you needed to take the version of the course that delved into the mathematics of time and time dilation.

The arguments that I've been having on the sci.physics.relativity discussion forum recently have centered on how atomic clocks work.  I appear to have a fundamental disagreement with the mathematicians about that.  They claim that an atomic clock ticks at the same rate at all altitudes and velocities, regardless of what has been demonstrated by Hafele and Keating and all the other time dilation experiments involving atomic clocks.  I say an atomic clock adjusts its tick rate to match the oscillation rate of cesium atoms, and those atoms change their oscillation rates when they are raised or lowered in altitude and when they are caused to move laterally. 

This would seem to be a great subject for a scientific paper.  So, I checked arxiv.org to see if they had any papers which explain how atomic clocks measure time dilation.  A search found 210 papers with the term "atomic clock" in the subject of the paper.  Scanning through those 210 papers, I was surprised at how many are about using atomic clocks to check for "dark matter."  Many others were about making better atomic clocks by one method or another.   However, some papers seem to be about time dilation and atomic clocks.  One such paper (#94 on the list) is titled "Optical Atomic Clocks" and was written by scientists at the National Institute for Standards and Technology (NIST).   It says on page 4:

As Maxwell realized, an atom can be an ideal frequency standard because, as far as we know, one atom is exactly identical to another atom of the same species. Therefore, if we build a device that registers the frequency of a natural oscillation of an atom, say the mechanical oscillations of an electron about the atom's core, all such devices will run at exactly the same frequency (except for relativistic effects discussed below), independent of comparison. Therefore, the requirement for making an atomic frequency standard is relatively easy to state: we take a sample of atoms (or molecules) and build an apparatus that produces an oscillatory signal that is in resonance with the atoms' natural oscillations. Then, to make a clock, we simply count cycles of the oscillatory signal.

In addition to environmental effects that perturb an atom's internal states and clock frequency, there can be errors in our determination of the clock atoms' frequency, even when atoms are perturbation free. The most fundamental of these effects are relativistic shifts, due to the different frames of reference of the atoms, probing lasers, and other atomic clocks.

The dominant uncertainty of both clocks arises from time dilation shifts caused by micromotion and residual secular motion of the ions.

Do you not realize that all scientists (including me) use a language which has been developed for over 100 years?

We use some words and terms which, for someone like you, may appear to be nonsensical (black hole, time dilation, spin, genetic algorithms, ant colonies, hot potato, etc. etc.) but we know to what they refer.

"Clocks tick faster", "clocks run slow", "time runs slow", etc., are all
terms we understand refer to the PASSING OF TIME. We are not confused nor we are mistaken. We know the language!!! You do not know the language!!!!

First postulate (the relativity principle): The laws of physics have the same form in all inertial reference frames.

The first postulate can also be stated as: There is no experiment you can do in an inertial reference frame to tell if you are at rest or moving uniformly at constant velocity.

Ed, we know this, because many of those authors have TOLD YOU
that what they wrote doesn't quite mean what they mean. They have told you that they are dumbing down.

You do copy stuff correctly and post it here, but then you come up with a completely goofy claim about what the quote means.

It might appear possible to overcome all the difficulties attending the definition of “time” by substituting “the position of the small hand of my watch” for “time.” And in fact such a definition is satisfactory when we are concerned with defining a time exclusively for the place where the watch is located.

Time is that which is measured by a clock. This is a sound way of looking at things. A quantity like time, or any other physical measurement, does not exist in a completely abstract way. We find no sense in talking about something unless we specify how we measure it. It is the definition by the method of measuring a quantity that is the one sure way of avoiding talking nonsense about this kind of thing. 

GR predicts that more time is experienced in lower gravitational potentials than higher, science knew about this since Einstein's first GR work in 1915.

Yes. And this happens WITHOUT a clock ever changing its tick rate; it's just geometry.

Tom, aren't you saying that we can forget reality, where clocks tick at different rates, and just look at the math (geometry) where you can CLAIM that every clock is "at rest" (i.e., stationary) in its own reference frame and therefore ticks at the same rate as every other clock that is IMAGINED TO BE "at rest" in its own reference frame?

Nope. Because you are WRONG -- there is not one single instance of an experiment showing that identical clocks actually tick at different rates. In EVERY CASE you ignore something essential: either the signals used in the comparison of tick rates, or the different paths through spacetime of the clocks in the comparison of elapsed proper times. The aspects that you ignore are what actually generate the observed differences, not clocks ticking at different rates.

All real experiments COMPARE the elapsed readings of these clocks to verify what SR and GR models predict. They are not comparing the instantaneous clock rate. In the Hafele-Keating, the elapsed time was 636 hours and 140000 seconds in the Chou at al experiment.

In order to have "elapsed readings," clocks MUST tick at different rates.  You make no sense.  How can clocks have different "elapsed readings" if they did NOT tick at different rates?

Easy...because when reunited (see Hafele-Keating), the clocks are showing the elapsed readings of their different paths through spacetime. This should be easy to you to understand: The ground clock had coordinates (x1,y1,z1,t1) the same coordinates than the flown clocks, AT THE BEGINING OF THE EXPERIMENT. The path the ground clock followed is clearly different from the path the flown clocks followed.

Hafele-Keating clearly give the equations which describe this difference of path, specifically equation 2:

T-To=[gh/c^2 - (2R Omega v + v^2)/(2c^2)]To

So the clocks, being extremely accurate and not changing their tick rates, were able to measure these elapsed times differences.

General Relativity effects are caused by the altitude of the flying clock - space time near the surface of the Earth is more steeply curved than at the height of the aircraft, so the airborne clock (and everything else on the aircraft) is travelling through space-time that is slightly less 'stretched' than it is at the Earth's surface. This stretching of space-time is what makes time run slower on the ground relative to on the aircraft.

October 4, 2018 - Yesterday was another one of those days.  I sat down to write a comment for this web site, but I had so many things bouncing around inside my head that I couldn't focus.   How can you convince someone that a postulate is not the same as a principle if they truly believe they are the same?  How can you convince people that the first section (page 1 and the top of page 2) of Einstein's 1905 paper "On The Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies" is not the "abstract," when they truly believe it is an "abstract."  How can anyone even think it's the abstract?  An abstract would be a summary of what is in the paper.  The first part of Einstein's paper is a "setup" or "introduction."  It presents an idea that is going to be examined in detail in the rest of the paper.

When I have a puzzle to solve, one way to try to find a solution is to do a Google search for some part of the puzzle.  I'm not sure what I searched for yesterday when I found part of a Stanford University physics course titled "Einstein's starting point: the two postulates" as presented by Academic Director Larry Randles Lagerstrom.



I watched it twice looking for something I could quote to resolve some argument, but everything Lagerstrom says could be argued by the mathematicians on the sci.physics.relativity forum to mean something else.  He calls the first part of Einstein's paper the "introduction," and does a great job of describing the puzzle about magnets and rings that got Einstein to wondering about the principle of relativity that had been around for centuries. 



But he never actually says anything that would firmly resolve any argument.  And he doesn't get into the second postulate in the lesson I watched.  I'll have to search around to see if I can find that part without actually signing up to take the whole course (it's free, but I dislike signing up for things and giving out my email address).    

Anyway, at the end of the day yesterday I hadn't even started on writing a comment for this web site, I was fed up with getting nothing but opinions from the mathematicians, and I kept thinking about ways to get them to discuss facts and experiments instead of opinions, so I told them I was going to end my participation in the thread about "Time Dilation as I understand it."  The thread had over 600 comments in it, and threads that long are difficult to work with.  Google keeps condensing and hiding parts of the comments. Then, purely on impulse, just before shutting down operations for the day, I started a new thread about "How Atomic Clocks Measure Time." I immediately regretted it, but the more I thought about it the more I saw it as a way to stop them from arguing mathematics and to start talking about the science of atomic clocks.  Plus, I can quote from many different sources to shoot down the mathematicians' beliefs instead of creating my own arguments.

This morning I see there are 10 new comments.  Four are just personal attacks, three are arguments between posters, but three are questions addressed to me that I need to answer.  And I think I can do so.  I think there is a VERY important lesson about time dilation within the workings of an atomic clock.  And if I can explain it to others in a few dozen different ways, maybe it will become clear and simple to me and everyone else.  We'll see.

Meanwhile, as I was looking at my web site logs this morning, I saw that some from Iqaluit, Nunavut, Canada had visited this site yesterday.  Iqaluit, Nunavut?  I had never heard of the city or the province.  It's a village on the southern end of  Baffin Island, at about the same latitude as Iceland.  Live and learn.

Einstein was clearly "raising" the conjecture to a postulate, in the sense that, he is elevating/strengthening/defining it as a postulate.

The postulate IS the principle!

No, he was raising it to a POSTULATE so instead of being a conjecture (seems to be true based on incomplete info) to ASSUMED TO BE TRUE for the following. The whole idea of the paper was that if both postulates really are true, this (SR) is what happens. It was NOT a subject for discussion, it was ASSUMED TRUE for the purpose of the paper.

the same laws of electrodynamics and optics will be valid for all frames of reference for which the equations of mechanics hold good 

After a profound critical study of the concept of simultaneity of distant events, Einstein realized that the principle of relativity could be made compatible with Maxwell’s equations if one abandoned Newtonian absolute time in favor of a new absolute: the speed of
light, the same in all inertial frames.

A postulate is an (usually fundamental) assumption a writer makes in order to discuss a subject in a coherent fashion. Examples of postulates are the Born rule in quantum mechanics (which defines how the wave function is to be interpreted), or in classical mechanics the existence of a Lagrangian (which defines the starting point of theoretical mechanics).

A principle is a more or less universally observed (usually fundamental) fact. Examples of principles are the second law of thermodynamics (universal dissipation), the principle of relativity (independence of the reference frame), or Heisenberg's uncertainty relation.

A hypothesis is a theoretical assumption made to develop a (usually alternative) theory. Examples are Planck's and Einstein's hypothesis of quantized light, or the existence of supersymmetry.

One can turn a principle or hypothesis into a postulate, but not a postulate into a principle.

1. The laws by which the states of physical systems undergo change are not affected, whether these changes of state be referred to the one or the other of two systems of co-ordinates in uniform translatory motion.

2. Any ray of light moves in the “stationary” system of co-ordinates with the determined velocity c, whether the ray be emitted by a stationary or by a moving body.

Examples of this sort, together with the unsuccessful attempts to discover any motion of the earth relatively to the “light medium,” suggest that the phenomena of electrodynamics as well as of mechanics possess no properties corresponding to the idea of absolute rest. They suggest rather that, as has already been shown to the first order of small quantities, the same laws of electrodynamics and optics will be valid for all frames of reference for which the equations of mechanics hold good.1 We will raise this conjecture (the purport of which will hereafter be called the “Principle of Relativity”) to the status of a postulate, and also introduce another postulate, which is only apparently irreconcilable with the former, namely, that light is always propagated in empty space with a definite velocity c which is independent of the state of motion of the emitting body. These two postulates suffice for the attainment of a simple and consistent theory of the electrodynamics of moving bodies based on Maxwell’s theory for stationary bodies. 

The used verb (will raise) has a very clear meaning in English, right?
It means that from there on the words "principle" and "postulate" are the same.

We will raise this conjecture (the purport of which will hereafter be called the “Principle of Relativity”) to the status of a postulate

A principle is: a fundamental truth or proposition that serves as the foundation for a system of belief or behavior or for a chain of reasoning.

A postulate is: a thing suggested or assumed as true as the basis for reasoning, discussion, or belief.

Einstein was trying to explain something.  So, he created two POSTULATES, which are things ASSUMED for the sake of discussion.  What he wanted to discuss was "a simple and consistent theory of the electrodynamics of moving bodies based on Maxwell’s theory for stationary bodies."

His new theory did "not require an 'absolutely stationary space' provided with special properties."  It's a theory based upon the movement of objects. 

It's a theory that says time moves at different rates for objects moving at different speeds.  So, you do not NEED any "absolutely stationary space" to measure movement from.  You can measure movement by the different rates at which time passes for different objects.

Yes. These are the ACTUAL postulates Einstein used to derive the theory we now know as Special Relativity. Not the paraphrases he gave in his Introduction.

Examples of a similar kind, as well as the experimental attempts to state a movement of the earth relative to the "light medium", lead to the conclusion that the concepts of absolute calm not only in mechanics, but also in electrodynamics do not correspond to properties of phenomena but rather for all coordinate systems, for which the mechanical equations apply, also the same electrodynamic and optical laws apply as this has already been proved for the first order.  We want this conjecture (its content in the following, principle of relativity") and, besides that, introduce the only apparently incomplete assumption that the light is in empty space always with a certain, from the state of motion of the emitting body independent speed Y propagate.  These two conditions are sufficient to become a simple one and to achieve consistent electrodynamics of moving bodies on the basis of Maxwell's theory for resting body.

If clocks actually ticked at different rates, as you FANTASIZE, GR and SR would have been refuted long ago.

Seamonkey makes regular backups of your bookmarks, in files that that starts with bookmarks, have a date and a bunch of numbers, and end in the extension .jsonlz4. You can use a file search utility, here is one https://www.mythicsoft.com/filelocatorlite/download/ to look for all files on your computer that end in .jsonlz4. Once you find them, look for ones dated before the "event" that lost data. Then copy that file somewhere you can find it such as the desktop. (X)  Within Seamonkey's CTRL-SHIFT-B window, first backup whatever bookmarks you currently have from the menu bar in that window, and also "export" them from that same menu. Then, restore the .jsonlz4 file you found one dated before the data loss using options in that menu bar. Import and export do not work with jsonlz4 files, only restore works. Restore does replace/overwrite your current bookmarks with the ones from the file you have found.

.jsonlz4":

 
The list shows that I have 14 automatic backups of my bookmark file in my computer.  Ten of them are from before the "disaster" (when the file was 24 KB in size), and four are from after the disaster.  Those four are at the bottom of the list, and you can see how the file increased in size as I found some of the lost bookmarks and re-bookmarked them.
 
So, now I just need to focus and go through the rest of the steps (after making sure I understand what each step does).

There were no new messages for me on the sci.physics.relativity forum, but it is what I keep thinking about, and it is what breaks my focus on recovering from the September 12 "disaster."  I keep thinking that a quiz of just a few questions can determine if you are a "Paradoxer" who misunderstands Einstein's theories, or if you are a "Relativist" who understands Einstein's theories.  But, I also realize that no amount of questions or arguments will convince a "Paradoxer" that he is the one who is mistaken.

Added note: Ah!  I figured out how to get back into my outlook.com email files! There was just one email waiting in the server inbox, and it was a carbon copy of an email that someone sent to my newsguy.com address.  So, I missed nothing.  It's just an email account I set up for some reason and never really used. 

One of the most enduring scientific debates of this century is the relativistic clock "paradox" (1) or problem (2), which stemmed originally from an alleged logical inconsistency in predicted time differences between traveling and reference clocks after a round trip.  This seemingly endless theoretical debate, which has flared up recently with renewed vigor (2, 3), begs for a convincing empirical resolution with macroscopic clocks. A simple and direct experimental test of the clock problem with portable atomic clocks is now possible because of the unprecedented ability achieved with these clocks (4).  

In conclusion, we have shown that the effects of travel on the time recording behavior of macroscopic clocks are in reasonable accord with predictions of the conventional theory of relativity, and that they can be observed in a straightforward and unambiguous manner with relatively inexpensive commercial jet flights and commercially available cesium beam clocks. In fact, the experiments were so successful that it is not unrealistic to consider improved versions designed to investigate aspects of the theory that were ignored in the predicted relativistic time differences (1). In any event, there seems to be little basis for further arguments about whether clocks will indicate the same time after a round trip, for we find that they do not.

The standard reason for rejection of Einstein's result is the feeling held by [Mendel] Sachs that a paradox would exist if Einstein were correct - that all reference frames should be equivalent and that the Lorentz rest-frames so basic to special relativity have no right to their special property, that of the simplest description of physical events. 

This book was at first conceived as a review of the literature on the clock paradox in relativity theory. The wealth of material which exists on this controversial issue is widely scattered in numerous books and journals, with the result that each time the controversy flares up, the same arguments are put forward with the firm belief that they are original. It seemed desirable, therefore, with the phenomenon of time-dilatation rapidly becoming commonplace (in the laboratory, at least) to gather the material together 'under one roof' and to sort and to examine the arguments in a unified way. The clock paradox has long occupied the attention of the layman. as well as the practising scientist, and so it has been my aim to make the book self-contained and to keep the mathematics as simple as possible.

• Dingleberry, a common name for Vaccinium erythrocarpum, a type of cranberry
• Dingleberry, a slang term for a stupid or foolish person;
• Dingleberry, a slang term for dried feces adhering to anal hair

It seems clear that mathematicians have problems with the word "stationary."  They fantasize that object-A moving at high speed is "stationary" when the mathematician needs to compute the speed of object-B moving relative to object-A.

Therefore, since they can fantasize that object-A is stationary when it
is actually moving, they can also fantasize that object-B can also be "stationary" as they imagine that object-A moves away from it.

This is a screwball misinterpretation of Relativity.  Einstein wrote that
his theory made the aether "superfluous," which mathematicians somehow wildly misinterpret to mean it makes motion reciprocal.

The aether was made "superfluous" because TIME can be used to determine who is moving faster than whom.  You do not need the aether.  If I am moving faster than you, time is moving slower for me, and a second on my clocks will be longer than a second on your clocks. 

Since mathematicians fantasize about "frames of reference," they argue that this requires some kind of "preferred frame of reference" that is TRULY stationary in the universe.  It doesn't.  While there COULD BE such a location, if I move faster than you and time thus moves slower for me, that just requires TIME to have a speed limit.  And, according to Einstein, TIME DOES HAVE A SPEED LIMIT.  It is the speed of light.  When an object moves at the speed of light, it experiences no time.  Photons experience no time.

Everything moving slower than the speed of light experiences time.  The slower you move, the faster time moves for you.

And there is nothing reciprocal about it.
And THERE ARE NO EXPERIMENTS WHICH SHOW TIME DILATION TO BE RECIPROCAL.

It is really bizarre the way the mathematicians repeatedly claim that all experiments show that velocity time dilation is reciprocal, but when I ask them to name such an experiment, they just ignore my request and change the subject.

I've been trying to get them to discuss the Hafele-Keating experiment, which certainly has absolutely nothing reciprocal about it.  The stationary clock at the U.S. Naval observatory never became a moving clock while the clocks on the aircraft somehow became stationary.  Nor did the time dilation results become reciprocal and show that the Navy's clock ran slower.

It's really a brain teaser to find good arguments to shoot down the theories held by the mathematicians.  The problem is: when I find a good argument, there's no way to prevent them from ignoring it or turning it into an argument over words and phrasing.  They just do not seem able to understand anything unless it is phrased the way it appears in some text book.  And if I do not phrase things that same way, they argue that I do not understand whatever it is.  That tells me they just memorized mathematical dogma instead of actually learning the science involved.

September 20, 2018 - It's really depressing to keep banging against walls as I try to recover from last week's disaster.  I still cannot check my emails at my outlook.com address.  I had been accessing those emails using an application
which got the emails from outlook.com, newsguy.com and from my Time-Warner account automatically.  That application vanished last Wednesday.  I found out how to get my emails from newsguy.com and Time-Warner, but I still haven't figured out how to get them from outlook.com.  I probably just need to focus on the problem.  I've got too many other things on my mind.

I also couldn't check on my book sales.  I set things up years ago so that I just clicked on a bookmark and that took me to Amazon's web page that showed
how many Kindle books I sold in the past month.  Then I would click on the bookmark that would take me to the CreateSpace page that would tell me how many paperback copies of my book I sold in the past month.  I just recovered the ability to check on CreateSpace during a pause in typing the previous sentence on this post, but I have to wait for an "idea" to occur to me to figure out how to get to my Kindle sales.  I must have spent at least a half hour this morning going through countless links on Amazon's web site trying to find the link to the page that shows my sales.  So far, no luck.  Oops.  Just figured out how to do it.  So, that problem is solved.

One bookmark that was interesting to find again was the bookmark to the web site where I convert IP addresses into locations.  I use it every day when I go through my web site logs to see who has been visiting this site.  I did a Google search for IP and location" and found dozens of places that supposedly tell you where an IP is located.  But the one I used wasn't on the first two pages of places.  And when I tried looking up an IP address using a couple of the sites on the first two pages, I got "Not Found" results.  So, I hunted through the list until I found the one I have been using on the third page.  And now it is a bookmark again, and I am saving a copy of all of my bookmarks.    

I sometimes don't know what bookmarks I'm missing until I want to do something and find that I can't do it because I no longer have the bookmark to the page where I do whatever it is.  Sigh.  At least I am making some progress.   

September 19, 2018 - Today marks one week since the "disaster" where I lost all my bookmarks, my emails, my email addresses, and all the contents of all the parameters that I have to fill in to access thing on the Internet.  I've only partially recovered.  However, I'm still arguing with mathematicians on Google's sci.physics.relativity forum.  It's like arguing with robots.  They are constantly telling me, "That does not compute," and "You must use the key words I am programmed to understand," or words to that effect.

I've been trying to get them to discuss experiments instead of mathematics, and I picked the Hafele-Keating experiment to start the discussions.  But they only want to discuss the mathematics used in the experiment.  As part of my research, I found the routes that Hafele and Keating took.  

When Hafele and Keating flew eastward, they flew from Washington's Dulles airport to London, to Frankfurt, to Istanbul, to Beirut, to Tehran, to New Delhi, to Bangkok, to Hong Kong, to Tokyo, to Honolulu, to Los Angeles, to Dallas, and then back to Washington.

When they flew westward, they flew from Washington to Los Angeles, to Honolulu, to Guam, to Okinawa, to Taipei, to Hong Kong, to Bangkok, to Bombay, to Tel Aviv, to Athens, to Rome, the Paris, to Shannon Ireland, to Boston, and then back to Washington.

Here's how the routes look on a world map:



Red is their eastward route, black is their westward route.  Notice that they never got within 500 miles of the equator. 

What strikes me about this image is that they were able to reasonably accurately estimate the time dilation figures ahead of time.  At the same time, what their mathematics showed was an estimate, a projection, not reality.  They had to make the actual flights to get actual numbers.  I keep arguing with mathematicians that mathematical models do not represent reality.  Now I can argue that the model Hafele and Keating created ahead of time was amazingly close, but it still did not represent reality. 

It also interesting how many stops Hafele and Keating made when they flew in October 1971.  They made 12 stops on  their eastward trip and 13 stops on their westward trip.  In contrast, when I recently argued with Flat Earthers about flying around the world near the South Pole on regularly scheduled airlines, I found I could do it in just 4 hops:

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