okay so i saw a video that claimed that you can get all of special relativity without fixing light speed

and it seems that's true.

and i know that you can get (presumably) all of QED via pilot wave stuff, which has no 'quantum weirdness' (except for non-locality, but nobody cared about that before einstein).

so is all the last hundred years of physics just people caring too much about single interpretations of much broader ideas?

@lain
>you can get all of special relativity without fixing light speed
This is true, but the finite speed of light was already well established by the time special relativity was come up with. In many ways, special relativity was just a better explanation of already-confirmed theories such as electrodynamics.

As for QM, I'm less well versed in that, but if I remember correctly it's very difficult to explain experimental results using deterministic models. And it's a common misconception that experts in the field are unanimous in how they interpret quantum mechanics; the Copenhagen interpretation is the most popular, but not a majority. https://www.cs.umd.edu/~gasarch/pys-quantum.pdf

@yakmacker i'm not talking about finite speed, i'm talking about isotropic speed in both directions

@lain you mean forwards and backwards in time?
Time-reversibility was also a very well established theory long before Einstein (it's a basic consequence of Newtonian, Lagrangian, and Hamiltonian mechanics, which are all equivalent on the intersection of their well-posed problems).

@yakmacker no no, just back and forth. it's an assumption in special relativty, and it turns out that if you don't make it, lots of the weirdness goes away (although of course you get other weirdness in exchange)

@yakmacker sorry this might be a bit unclear still, i mean that light goes at the same speed both ways. experiments can only show that it goes a certain speed to-and-fro, but not one-way.