The traditional presentation of special relativity is made from a rupture withprevious ideas, such as the notion of absolute motion, emphasizing the antagonism of theLorentz-Poincar′e’s views and Einstein’s ideas. However, a weaker formulation of the postulatesallows to recover all the mathematical results from Einstein’s special relativity and reveals thatboth viewpoints are merely different perspectives of one and the same theory. The apparentcontradiction simply stems from different procedures for clock “synchronization,” associatedwith different choices of the coordinates used to describe the physical world. Even veryfundamental claims, such as the constancy of the speed of light, relativity of simultaneity andrelativity of time dilation, are seen to be no more than a consequence of a misleading languageadopted in the description of the physical reality, which confuses clock rhythms with clock timereadings. Indeed, the latter depend on the “synchronization” adopted, whereas the former donot. As such, these supposedly fundamental claims are not essential aspects of the theory, asreality is not altered by a mere change of coordinates. The relation between the rhythms of clocksin relative motion is derived with generality. This relation, which is not the standard textbookexpression, markedly exposes the indeterminacy of special relativity, connected with the lack ofknowledge of the value of the one-way speed of light. Moreover, the theory does not collapse andremains valid if some day the one-way speed of light is truly measured and the indeterminacyis removed. It is further shown that the slow transport method of “synchronization” cannot beseen as distinct from Einstein’s procedure.
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