Additions, corrections, and evolution.

Many friends and colleagues have seen things that I missed when I wrote the original article. (since added to the physics teacher magazine version)



 

1)      My friend the mathematician Mike McGarry  has pointed out that on the planet Hermes where the speed of light was 1 mph in the northward direction, the baseball game would be even more interesting than as initially depicted. To wit: after the baseball hit you in the head, the image of the baseball traveling would indeed arrive but it would arrive as a movie being played backward. Since light is traveling so much slower than the baseball the first image of the baseball you would see would be composed of the light that reflected from the baseball just before it hit your head, say one inch away, the next image would be light that had reflected off the baseball when it was two inches away, then three etc., and the last image to arrive would be the light from the baseball when the bat first hit it. Even though the light of the impact left first, it would still get there last. So the images would unfold in reverse. Since you wouldn't know when you saw an image if you were looking at a batter still up or a previous batter, this exacerbates an already confusing situation. This backward time sequence appearance would hold true for looking at any object traveling toward you northward at greater than 1 mph.                                                                                                    

The reviewer from The Physics Teacher magazine also pointed this out since I did not include it in the original version.

  2)    A Physicist friend of mine brought up the interesting point that since matter is held together by an exchange of virtual particles between the atomic constituents, and these particles travel at the speed of light, it is not clear that an atom would hold together in a frame moving faster than light, in our Aether based framework. The particles leaving the downwind side of the atom could never reach the upwind side, and all atoms would disintegrate. This is not a trivial problem for Physicists made of matter. This question needs further examination.

3) Another observation…. If you were in a faster than light frame , in the direction against the Aether wind you would not be able to push an object to go faster because the push which is carried by electromagnetic forces could not go faster than light. But, if you could get ahead of the object (somehow) and turned around you could pull it because the force in that direction (with the Aether wind) would be at double light speed.

I’m not sure this works it depends on microscopic details of how the pulling force is transmitted in an object this needs further examination too.