The Hafele-Keating Experiment Supports Special Relativity

I appreciate Con consulting an expert source for the purposes of our debate, but the fact is his expert source provided nothing but an expert opinion. He provided Con no math, not even a single digit. So Con's assertion that the "correlated rate-change method" is honest is just an appeal to authority. This entire debate requires me to challenge the authorities named Hafele & Keating; if appeals to authority were acceptable, I would have lost this debate before we even started, which is absurd.Con said I can find out what the correlated rate-change method is by referring to the 1972 paper. This is not true. It's not only vague, it lacks data. For instance: "A piecewise extrapolation of the time trace for each clock relative to MEAN(USNO), with proper accounting for those identified rate changes, then produced the relativistic time difference listed in Table 1." What in the world is "proper accounting" in this context? It's unclear. It could mean anything; the 1972 paper only provides a qualitative, not quantitative, description of this mysterious method which has the capacity to bring frustrating results into agreement with theory.I ask the voters to ask themselves honestly, is it at all possible to derive a statistically significant result when looking for a relativistic effect that is 10 times smaller than the margin of error for a single clock? Of course not. Now, would increasing the sample size to 4 such clocks enable one to derive a statistically significant result? No; 4 is just not going to cut it. You would need perhaps 100 such clocks, or, even better, clocks that are at least 10 times more precise. It doesn't take a PhD in Statistics to realize this.Look at it another way; the most reliable clock was #447, as Hafele himself admitted. It also demonstrated the least time-dilation! Clearly, this correlation between clock reliability and lack of time-dilation should undermine the credibility of using this experiment to prove time-dilation. It's funny how the authors ended their 1972 report on this note: "[T]here seems to be little basis for further arguments about whether clocks will indicate the same time after a round trip, for we find that they do not." Lol! Of course you're going to find a running clock tells a different time after a flight of several days; what else can you expect?!Con says, "One may think that these results are not consistent with special relativity because one clock gained three nanoseconds in the eastward direction, but as Con quotes Hafele as stating, one single clock cannot prove time dilation. Why is this? It’s because one clock on its own is too imprecise to prove time dilation. Using the same reasoning, however, one clock on its own is too imprecise to disprove time dilation." On both trips, 1 out of 4 clocks changed time in the wrong direction. I'm not using this to disprove time-dilation; I'm using it to prove that this experiment is useless for demonstrating time-dilation. Both Con and the experimenters make a big deal out of the fact that the average of the results were negative when predicted to be negative, and positive when predicted to be positive. But this is not a big deal at all. There were only 4 possibilities, and they just got lucky. It could have been positive/positive, negative/negative, or positive/negative. Instead, it was negative/positive. That's just luck (or, as Hafele put it in 1971, "amusing"). And it wasn't even quantitatively correct!Con says, "Professor Maudlin informed me that Hafele and Keating’s data has been re-verified at a higher precision" But Maudlin is simply referring to the correlated rate-change method, which we are unable to verify! Does Con want us to take Maudlin's word for it that the method is trustworthy? If it was trustworthy, why was it not published in full in the 1972 report?Con says other experiments confirmed this one but that's not fair; this debate is only about this particular experiment. I disagree with his assertion but it's not as if I have space to falsify all those other experiments in this last round of the debate. "Con has slandered two great scientific minds without any basis." I didn't slander anyone. I was very careful with my wording. I said the data appears to be fraudulent; I didn't say it actually is. "[A] result that is different from zero is due to more than natural skewing, then it cannot be statistically insignificant" Lol! Con doesn't understand what statistically insigificant is! Quantities greater than zero can be insignificant, as long as they are within the range of experimental error. The fact that each clock had a margin of error 10 times larger than the predicted relativistic effect, proves that any results which appear to be in favor of theory are not significant; they are meaningless. "Con has therefore failed to refute the average time gains and losses of the clocks" Are you kidding me!? You can't parade this as proof of theory whenever the quantities of gains and losses were either of the wrong amount, or within the range of error! "Con states that it is not enough to have time dilation, and the experiment must prove time dilation as well as special relativity’s predictions for the degree of time dilation. I accept this standard, as the consensus in the physics community is that the numbers measured by Hafele and Keating are consistent with the predictions of special relativity within the margin of error." In other words, even though Con has absolutely no explanation for why the amount of alleged time-dilation appears to be the wrong quantity, he will assume, based on the consensus of the physics community, that it was of the right quantitity anyway. The fact that Con repeatedly must defer to a third party's opinion instead of actually providing hard evidence, like actual numbers, reveals the feebleness of his case.By the way, here is the graph of my numbers. The colored graph I already posted was actually of Hafele's numbers. The difference between our two graphs is that Hafele took the unsteadiness (drift-rate) of the clocks before the flights, and after, then corrected the raw time changes using the average of the two drift-rates; in my graph (and numbers) I simply assumed the instability before the flight applied throughout the flight. In neither case do the results confirm the quantitative predictions of Special Relativity.