What the Global Positioning System Tells Us about Relativity

It didn't take very long before it was decided that the switch needed to be permanently in the 'on' position, and it was dropped from subsequent models.

EDIT: makes you wonder if Einstein had not made his predictions regarding relativity, this would have been the first real opportunity to find out in a 'natural' way, how long it would have taken them based on the observation that things did not work as intended.

As a random example, the traditional exposition of special relativity depends on working in an INERTIAL reference frame. Hence the answer to Richard Keating's puzzlement is that the time dilation depends on absolute velocities relative to an inertial frame. A convenient inertial frame being approximately the vector sum of the Earth's rotation and the airplane speeds. (Approximately because the Earth still goes around the Sun, and the Sun around the Milky Way. And then there are the effects of gravity.) Calculating relative speeds in a rotating frame of reference gives an incorrect answer, and SR predicts that fact.

To address the more fundamental problem, nowhere does he address the point accepted by Lorentz himself that the Lorentz transformations with a preferred frame of reference causes every other inertial frame of reference to make absolutely identical calculations. Therefore there is no possible experimental difference between Lorentzian Relativity and Special Relativity. Or, put alternately, there is absolutely no way to single out any particular inertial reference frame as being preferred.

Furthermore Lorentzian Relativity has no theory of gravity. So it is intellectually dishonest to include corrections from GR in a discussion about LR. Fundamentally you can't discuss GR without accepting the idea of not only having no preferred inertial reference frames, but in fact having no inertial reference frames at all!

What?