The Motion of Lightning and Thunder

The science of mechanics, the study of motion, was considered the basis of physics by the ancients of physics, whether the physics of Greece or Newton or the nineteenth century.

But, said Einstein, we are in motion as we study motion. Relativity is always true so the truth is, as it were, always false.

That's OK because we can say what we mean by false. We mean that if someone else is studying the same motion but is themselves in a different state of motion from ours then that person will get a set of results different from ours in standard, reconcilable ways.

But, said Einstein, when we study the motion of light we get results only reconcilable by assuming that lengths shorten in the direction of motion.

But is this the only way of reconciling the measurements?

Thunder and lightning are one event which we are aware of later as two motions - the motion of light and then the motion of sound.

We know that the motion of sound is carried along with the motion of the earth by gravity while the motion of light is not. That is why the speed of light does not change regardless of the speed of its physical source. Once in motion light is independent of that source in a way that sound is not.

Sound (or the air moved by sound) is carried by gravity just as is its physical source (for instance, a man on a train) so sound maintains its initial relationship to its physical source.

Sound waves move at the speed of sound plus the speed of the source because both waves and source are carried by gravity.

The source of light is carried by gravity but not the motion of light. Why then do we talk about the motion of light as if it had all the characteristics of the motion of sound with the weird proviso that light always has the same speed and length shortens as other motions approach the speed of light.

For consider what this means in the case of thunder and lightening. Suppose we sped up thunder until it was almost as fast as lightning. Why should any length change? Usually, the light from the single event reaches us without shortening any distances as we know from counting seconds till the thunder arrives. Why should gradually speeding up the thunder shorten that same distance? It would change measurements, not distances.

For Einstein, the idealist, if the measurement changes, then the distances changes. But this is a metaphysical presupposition, not a physical conclusion.

Why not say that motions carried by gravity maintain their relationship to their physical source while light does not maintain its relationship to its physical source but instead maintains its relationship to the position in absolute space of the physical source at the moment the light was emitted. This is the initiating point.

The motion of the earth in space moves the physical source away from this initiating point in absolute space at once but light does not "forget where it came from." Light moves so fast that it illuminates everything around its physical source even as its initiating point and its physical source move apart at one third the speed of light due to the motion of the earth around the sun.

It seemed to Einstein that no physical motion or entity corresponded to the idea of absolute space propounded by Newton, once the idea of the aether was given up. However he could have said that that the initiating point of a light wave was a point in absolute space.

I think that the