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Talk:Theory of relativity (view source)
Revision as of 03:53, September 6, 2018
, 03:53, September 6, 2018→Numbers for claims about Mercury's precession.
:::Not even top relativists claim that the advance of the perihelion of Mercury proves the General Theory of Relativity anymore. Once the divergence between more accurate measurements and the theory began occurring nearly 15 years ago, relativists stopped reporting data about this. The Wikipedia entry on this displays a style of everything except confirmation by the data of the theory. Instead, it talks about historical motivation and uses [[liberal style]] like "consistent with" rather than "confirms". Its citations are then more than a decade old. See [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tests_of_general_relativity#Perihelion_precession_of_Mercury].--[[User:Aschlafly|Andy Schlafly]] ([[User talk:Aschlafly|talk]]) 12:13, 5 September 2018 (EDT)
:::Not even top relativists claim that the advance of the perihelion of Mercury proves the General Theory of Relativity anymore. Once the divergence between more accurate measurements and the theory began occurring nearly 15 years ago, relativists stopped reporting data about this. The Wikipedia entry on this displays a style of everything except confirmation by the data of the theory. Instead, it talks about historical motivation and uses [[liberal style]] like "consistent with" rather than "confirms". Its citations are then more than a decade old. See [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tests_of_general_relativity#Perihelion_precession_of_Mercury].--[[User:Aschlafly|Andy Schlafly]] ([[User talk:Aschlafly|talk]]) 12:13, 5 September 2018 (EDT)
:::::I don't think anyone claims that the perihelion measurements '''prove''' GR. Experiments can only '''refute''' a theory. They can also be '''consistent with''' a theory. When enough experiments, especially experiments that investigate a wide variety of phenomena, are shown to be consistent with the theory, it lends credence to the theory. When no other plausible theory can explain the those observations, we can say that they '''validate''' the theory. The Mercury observations are just one phenomenon. By themselves they couldn't validate or prove GR. And there's another competing theory—the Newcomb-Hall exponent-fudging theory. That one doesn't hold up for things other than Mercury, which helps validate GR. But there are many other supporting observations listed on the page—bending of light, gravitational time dilation, gravitational waves, geodetic precession, Shapiro effect, etc. It is these widely disparate observations that lead people to say that GR is "validated". [[User:SamHB|SamHB]] ([[User talk:SamHB|talk]]) 23:53, 5 September 2018 (EDT)
::::My question for you was just what the specific numbers you are comparing are, in support of your statement that the conflict is greater than the margin of error. For example: are you comparing the calculated vs. observed numbers for the anomalous precession only from the Pijpers paper, or some other numbers from the Wikipedia article, or some third source? You mention 15 years ago, so are you referring to some data from 2003 or thereabouts? As I said above, the numbers presented on the page here are ''not'' in conflict, so if you are operating with a different set of numbers we should know what those are. --[[User:Brossa|Brossa]] ([[User talk:Brossa|talk]]) 23:03, 5 September 2018 (EDT)
::::My question for you was just what the specific numbers you are comparing are, in support of your statement that the conflict is greater than the margin of error. For example: are you comparing the calculated vs. observed numbers for the anomalous precession only from the Pijpers paper, or some other numbers from the Wikipedia article, or some third source? You mention 15 years ago, so are you referring to some data from 2003 or thereabouts? As I said above, the numbers presented on the page here are ''not'' in conflict, so if you are operating with a different set of numbers we should know what those are. --[[User:Brossa|Brossa]] ([[User talk:Brossa|talk]]) 23:03, 5 September 2018 (EDT)
:::::The Pjpers material was not put in by me. Someone else, maybe AugustO. By the way, I do not copy stuff from Wikipedia; I go straight to the source if possible. If what I've written above is "Wikipedia style", so be it. I don't pay attention to "Wikipedia style"; I just try to use terms correctly and logically.
:::::I have no idea where Andy gets the idea that there are more recent data than those reported by Pijpers, and that are inconsistent with GR. Perhaps Andy should cite that. I'm not aware that "relativists [whatever that means] stopped reporting data" about any such divergence in measurements.
:::::I started to clean up the approximations, but I started getting edit conflicts with Andy, so I'm going to stop for tonight. Be aware that the seemingly obvious way we do things now may not be the way Einstein did things in 1916. In particular, he measured the precession in fractions ''of a full rotation'' rather than in radians. And, of course, it was per Mercury year, not per earth year, so all that stuff needs to be corrected for. [[User:SamHB|SamHB]] ([[User talk:SamHB|talk]]) 23:53, 5 September 2018 (EDT)
== References ==
== References ==
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