Clete, would you be open to the rephrasing "duration is relative"? In other words, what one might count as one second would not be what someone else at a different speed would count? I'm just trying to clarify whether you disagree with relativity in principle or semantically.
Time is a convention of language used to convey information about duration and/or sequence. We use clocks of varying type and complexity to give us words with which to express that information. It is therefore an easy to understand error that people make when they confuse a discussion about clocks for a discussion about time.
And it is that confusion where my objection rests. I do not deny that there is an effect that an object's speed has, but that effect only looks to us like it has to do with time because its effecting the things we use as clocks, which is the only thing we have with which to discuss time. And this confusion becomes clear when you use a different clock that can be used to "time" both of the other clocks that are being Relativistically compared to one another. Sort of an objective, "big picture" clock, if you'll allow the expression. In Bob's article this third clock was the Earth's orbit around the Sun and how many days it took to make that orbit. But any third clock that can be simultaneously applied to both of the other two would do, like how many time the newspaper was delivered, for example.
The bottom line is that both the base and summit of a mountain make the same exact number of revolutions around the Earth's center. Their relative position within the Earth's gravity well is irrelevant to the measure of this third, more objective, clock. If Relativity were actually effecting time itself this would not be the case. The base would eventually become severely out of phase with the summit to the point that the summit will have made an extra half a revolution than the base had all without ever having come away from the mountains base. That would be a neat trick.
A real world example might be the center of galaxies. The closer you get to the Black Hole the more pronounced the Relativistic effects. This would continue to magnify to the point that time would virtually stop for any object near the center. And yet, we have witnessed objects orbiting very closely to the Black Hole. How is an orbit accomplished in any reasonably brief period of time if time has all but stopped? You might say that time has only nearly stopped for the thing orbiting. And I would respond that I'm sitting here watching IT perform its orbit. I'm not the one orbiting the Black Hole every few hours, it is. And it doesn't matter what the object's perception of time is unless you are attempting to synchronize your clocks with the clocks on the object. The fact is that it exists now and I exist now and I am therefore able to observe its movement around the Black Hole. I have no evidence whatsoever that suggests that it has ever left the present moment nor that such is even possible. Indeed, if you pay close attention to that last sentence you'll notice the self-contradictory nature of such an idea.
Okay, I'm rambling now. I hope I successfully answered your question.
Resting in Him,
Clete
