Viveka wrote: ↑Fri Nov 17, 2017 6:07 am...in my thought-experiment the light itself is a spherical wave.
I think this is based on a misunderstanding of quantum mechanics. It is not the light wave that is spherical, rather the wave function. This, in essence, is a response to the two slit experiment which shows, conclusively, that photons are not points of energy. In the 'shut up and calculate' school of physics, it doesn't matter what that means in physical terms, because the maths works.
The issue is described by Nobel Prize winner Robert Laughlin:
"It is ironic that Einstein's most creative work, the general theory of relativity, should boil down to conceptualizing space as a medium when his original premise [in special relativity] was that no such medium existed [..] The word 'ether' has extremely negative connotations in theoretical physics because of its past association with opposition to relativity. This is unfortunate because, stripped of these connotations, it rather nicely captures the way most physicists actually think about the vacuum…The modern concept of the vacuum of space, confirmed every day by experiment, is a relativistic ether. But we do not call it this because it is taboo."
In practise, this allows photons to be conceptualised as expanding wave fronts of a specific (quantum of) energy. Because of the electronic nature of most of our detection devices, that quantum of energy will only register if it triggers a quantum leap in an electron orbiting an atom. To do that, the whole of the energy has to be absorbed by the atom; but that energy is spread across the wavefront. It's as if the atom sucks up the whole of the wavefront (very loosely the collapse of the wave function), at which point we go 'Ah! There's the photon.' But since that can happen anywhere along the wavefront, until the wave causes a quantum leap, there is no real sense in which it is a photon in a specific place.
Viveka wrote: ↑Fri Nov 17, 2017 6:07 amSince the light clock uses light, it cannot change its speed of light, but rather the length-contraction or time-dilation must occur whenever there is appreciable approach of the speed of light in order to change how fast it 'ticks'.Thus, whenever length-contraction or time-dilation occurred it would only change how fast it 'ticks' and thereby change the geometry of the sphere into an ellipsoid. Here's the contradiction: the sphere of light must both be deformed through 'ticking' slower or faster due to time dilation and length contraction, but, yet, it cannot be deformed through the invariance of the speed of light.
Right. This is based on a misunderstanding of special relativity. It is not the case that the speed of light doesn't change; the claim is that the speed of light in a vacuum will be measured as the same in any inertial frame. That would be very difficult to account for if there were any such thing as a true vacuum, but note that Laughlin describes the vacuum as a "relativistic ether" (some physicists think that is what the Higgs field is). In other words, 'space' is a substance that can be stretched and compressed, which is the basic premise of general relativity. In which case, even if light were a wave, as you describe, it would not be spherical, it's shape would follow whatever geodesics the local conditions (gravity and motion) generated.