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CHAPTER Progress means a better perception of reality down progress. Of course, we know how to fly space shuttles and gen- erate nuclear electricity, but that is already in the past. However, we persist in hanging on to the classic inertial model. Curiously, the the- ory of special relativity is already one hundred years old. It is said that the balance tipped one century ago. In fact, light speed is in the hot seat. Approaching it leads to relativistic physics. Einstein made two assumptions. The first was that gravitational and inertial mass are equal. The second was that light speed c is constant regardless of the chosen benchmark. To this day, neither one can be verified incon- testably for an extremely simple reason. We have never measured a phenomenon. In addition, neither the measuring device itself, nor any of the observers has ever exceeded this speed by even one percent! For instance, the best aircraft can only achieve a difference of one millionth of a second between their clock and ours. Our best spacecraft reach 1 . a wae 14 1 see c a only one ten thousandth of c and show only a difference of one thou- sandth of a second. Of course, the difficulty is that the instrument fol- lows the distortions of its new Galilean benchmark. We measure particles, i.e., entities presumed corpuscular, on the outside! They are part of a specific spatio-temporal frame of reference: the measuring instrument! It is a bit like judging the performance of an airplane at high altitude when it is about to land. Here, the instrument (the run- way) is a wave function that significantly perturbs the wave function of the particle. The resultant has nothing to do with the intrinsic real- ity of the particle. This subtlety is eclipsed by the affirmation according to which light speed c is a constraint, because mass would then be infinite and require 39 REFERRING TO OUR PAST ACHIEVEMENTS slows