Hi, Burt.

Thank you for this.

The added complication of the effect of a gravitational field is indeed harder to understand. Your point is very interesting and important. I am still thinking about this one.

As for a neutral observer for the muons. With the vast profits generated by the licensing of my global warming engine, I have set up an orbiting lab that fires muons in the right direction and speed to do the job of the neutral observer. The lab runs muons in a stationary state to act as the home twin. I have to rely on a symmetry argument to pretend that the travelling muons virtually turn around for a return to base.

I think that the faster moving muons record less time on their way can perhaps be understood on the idea that they hardly interact with anything on the way, and so they have less experience per kilometer travelled. I have not yet read an autobiography of a muon, but I am guessing that it will back me up when it arrives. Muons in a chamber have a good chance to interact with the walls of the chamber, and this counts as experience for them. Light pulses are the extreme case, for they record no experience on the way. This is of course just a kind of Aesop's fable, a sort of allegory.

The definite facts in the life of a muon are its creation and its annihilation. (No taxes are yet levied on muons.) These two facts set up a particular reference frame, inertial between them, privileged for this problem. An distant observer inertial in a reference frame moving with respect to the travelling muon has to do quite a lot of data processing to work out what is happening to the local (travelling) muon. This processing takes time. So he observes the travelling muon to have a long life. I am not sure if this makes sense. I will think about it. This is getting towards a sort of interpretation of your first maxim, I think.

Regards,

Christopher