Here’s a question for the OP; have you discussed your proposed experiment with these co-workers? What do they have to say about the idea?
I think you are exactly right. I expect you to notice my error in the next experiments that I will type here. I hope you can educate me.
Yes, we have discussed it for hours recently. 100’s of hours, over the years. Some of these guys are too smart for me. They talk about the ether, which has not been proven. I’m an EE and have been studying and building GPS systems for decades since 1994. Some of my coworkers are in error. They believe we can do this experiment using GPS clock without taking into account clock differences or drift miles apart. I think this is wrong since it assumes light is the same speed in every direction. The thing we are trying to measure. We have agreed it might be within 1ns. Since you can move a GPS clock 1000 miles and back. Even disconnected, and it will still be within 1ns. That’s why I suggested measuring the speed of light within 1%? We have covered these topics in depth, yet not everyone agrees. Communication is difficult even in person. Obviously someone is wrong, someone is more right. This is true even among those Physicists writing the papers we are reading. I’m here to get a different perspective or “opinion”. And I have already Thank you!
I don’t even know which ideas you’re asking anyone to correct. I can’t tell what you’re trying to prove or disprove at all.
You want to send a laser to reflectors on the moon, and want to know if it will return to the original spot or will the earth have rotated ~1100m beyond the origin from which it was sent, making the return path different than the sent path?
I think you answered your own question.
They are either talking about some very fringe ideas that crop up every now and again, or are talking about the luminiferous aether that was comprehensively disproven well over a century ago. The history of special relativity begins from Michelson and Morley failing to find any evidence of the luminiferous aether.
Efforts with the Sagnac Effect in the first few decades of last century were in part new ideas and experiments intended to disprove SR. Which they didn’t.
There is a slightly weird commentary one hears trying to make the case that the CMB both provides a universal special frame of reference (which it arguably does for limited meanings of “special”) and by doing so provides a counter to the basis of relativity - which it does not. Indeed I would argue that it provides a further justification for relativistic arguments. The idea that the CMB interacts with photons in intergalactic flight is also trotted out as claiming the CMB is a form of aether. Which it isn’t. Critically the CMB does not behave as a medium by which EM waves are propagated. It is itself just EM radiation, and travels in exactly the same manner as any other EM wave does. And according to the same rules.
Any attempt to measure long distances with time of flight of light is going to run into minimally SR, and if you leave the Earth’s gravity well, GR.
Trivia question - does a clock on the moon’ surface run faster or slower than a clock on the Earth’s surface?
The answer is that on the Moon it runs faster. This is despite the Moon wizzing about around the Earth. GR wins over SR, and the shallower gravity well of the moon, and lower escape velocity from the surface, leads to smaller time dilation.
There is an orbit above the Earth where time dilation from GR and SR balance and time passes at the same rate as on the Earth’s surface. Which is amusing, but unimportant.
GR effects we might usefully ignore include frame dragging. One might note that Einstein was really supportive of this result of GR, and considered it a very important idea that supported Mach’s Principle. Something Einstein was very keen on. Mach’s principle gets us well into questions about the nature of reality and the universe we know we don’t understand. Gravity Probe B probably confirmed frame dragging, but the predicted effect is on the ragged edge of being measurable in our feeble gravity. It has certainly not been disproven, and is generally accepted as a real effect.
Francis wow! Thanks for educating and staying on topic!
Bumping this up because You Tube just served me a very curious video. One that rather makes me curious about the origin of some of the musings mentioned here.
This channel it seems has been around for a year or so, and until recently seems to have been a reasonably solid purveyor of better than average discussions about aspects of relativity. But now they are teasing a revelatory insight that unseats Einstein and his “terrible mistake”, one that looks a lot like a theory that is invoking a new kind of aether and makes claims about measuring one-way travel of light, all explaining everything in GR, and doing so in a better and more consistent manner. There seem to be a few other video’s leading up to here, and clearly there is going to be a great reveal soon.
No idea as to whether the OP’s thoughts derive from this source, but there does seem to be some curious overlap.