FitzGerald, Lorentz and Poincaré adhered to a false but still rational physical pictu a UNILATERAL length contraction caused by the interaction of the moving object with the ether. By introducing mutual length contraction and mutual time dilation Einstein actually killed (rationality in) science:

http://books.google.com/books?id=JokgnS1JtmMC
Banesh Hoffmann, Relativity and Its Roots, p. 106: "The effect is mutual. Each of us finds the other's lengths in the direction of our relative motion contracted. When FitzGerald and Lorentz and Poincaré spoke of a contraction, they thought of it as arising from motion through the ether. Undoubtedly they silently assumed that someone at rest in the ether would find that moving lengths were contracted but that a moving observer would find that lengths at rest in the ether were expanded compared with his own. And the even greater silence of these scientists about the slowing of clocks shows that in spite of their mathematical equations being the same as Einstein's, the idea of a reciprocal slowing of clocks was foreign to their views."

MUTUAL time dilation means that in no scenario an observer can see another observer's clock running ahead of his own clock. Only running behind can be observed, and not in an absolute sense at that: I see your clock running behind mine, you see mine running behind yours, and our disagreement is essential - it cannot be settled.

So mutual time dilation, although a valid consequence of Einstein's 1905 postulates, is an impotent concept, and in his 1905 paper Einstein found it profitable to violate it and suggest that the moving observer sees the stationary clock running AHEAD of the moving clock - a breathtaking idiocy that the gullible world has been worshiping ever since:

http://www.fourmilab.ch/etexts/einstein/specrel/www/
ON THE ELECTRODYNAMICS OF MOVING BODIES, A. Einstein, 1905: "From this there ensues the following peculiar consequence. If at the points A and B of K there are stationary clocks which, viewed in the stationary system, are synchronous; and if the clock at A is moved with the velocity v along the line AB to B, then on its arrival at B the two clocks no longer synchronize, but the clock moved from A to B lags behind the other which has remained at B by tv^2/2c^2 (up to magnitudes of fourth and higher order), t being the time occupied in the journey from A to B."

http://plus.maths.org/issue37/featur...ein/index.html
John Barrow FRS: "Einstein restored faith in the unintelligibility of science. Everyone knew that Einstein had done something important in 1905 (and again in 1915) but almost nobody could tell you exactly what it was. When Einstein was interviewed for a Dutch newspaper in 1921, he attributed his mass appeal to the mystery of his work for the ordinary person: "Does it make a silly impression on me, here and yonder, about my theories of which they cannot understand a word? I think it is funny and also interesting to observe. I am sure that it is the mystery of non-understanding that appeals to them...it impresses them, it has the colour and the appeal of the mysterious." Relativity was a fashionable notion. It promised to sweep away old absolutist notions and refurbish science with modern ideas. In art and literature too, revolutionary changes were doing away with old conventions and standards. All things were being made new. Einstein's relativity suited the mood. Nobody got very excited about Einstein's brownian motion or his photoelectric effect but relativity promised to turn the world inside out."

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