"Whether or not you can observe a thing depends upon the theory you use. It is the theory which decides what can be observed."
- Albert Einstein -
Time Dilation
In Foamy Ether Theory, the 'flow of time' is synonymous with the 'flow of ether'. And the faster you travel through ether, or the faster ether flows through you, the more time dilation is noticed. Looking at the fast moving particle animation again (Figure 6b), you can see the the ether cluster is moving through foamy ether. This causes time dilation to take effect as predicted in Special Relativity.
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In Figure 9 I presented an animation that showed ether flowing in towards the earth. That ether is flowing in a downward direction at the surface of the Earth with a speed of 11.2 km/sec (see Figure 12). One would expect that you would experience time dilation that is equal to someone traveling in a space ship at that speed. This, in fact, turns out to be the case! This, I believe, is a marvellous confirmation that matter causes an ether inflow to take place. Relativity Theory offers no explanation of why there are two totally separate causes of time dilation. Foamy Ether Theory explains this quite easily. When you are traveling through space, you experience time dilation; and when space (foamy ether) travels through you, like on the surface of a planet, you also experience time dilation.
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This 'inflow' can also be used to explain the gravitational redshift that occurs when a photon leaves a large object such as the Earth or sun. When looking at the ether flowing towards the Earth animation (Figure 9), you will notice that the cells or bubbles of foamy ether are larger when farther away from the Earth, and become smaller as they approach the Earth's surface. A light wave starting from the Earth's surface will occupy (or traverse) a certain number of cells. When the wave reaches a point where it is farther away from the Earth, the wave still traverses the same number of ether cells, but because the cells are larger in size, so is the wave. The wave becomes stretched, thus appearing more red.
This stretching of ether can also be used to explain the redshift that occurs from galaxies that appear to be receding as a result of the expansion of the universe. If you stretch out a long elastic band and pluck one end of it, a wave will travel from that end to the other. But if you quickly stretch the elastic band while the wave is in transit, the wave will be longer in length when it reaches the other end because the elastic band is more stretched than when the wave first started out.
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Foamy Ether theory works well in explaining these phenomena, since the features of distorted space and time, are built in.
