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Talk:Theory of relativity (view source)
Revision as of 17:20, November 15, 2009
, 17:20, November 15, 2009→Comments on Newtonian Mechanics
:Absolutely. Johann Soldner, 1803, for one. I'm going to put that into the GR page. But probably not quite yet, there's a ''huge'' rewrite going on. I'm sure there were people who thought that the deflection under Newton should be zero, but they were just not thinking clearly. Any statement saying the expected deflection was zero should be taken out; not true. BTW, I think the detailed treatment of issues like this belongs in the GR page, and the R page should just link to it. [[User:PatrickD|PatrickD]] 12:01, 15 November 2009 (EST)
:Absolutely. Johann Soldner, 1803, for one. I'm going to put that into the GR page. But probably not quite yet, there's a ''huge'' rewrite going on. I'm sure there were people who thought that the deflection under Newton should be zero, but they were just not thinking clearly. Any statement saying the expected deflection was zero should be taken out; not true. BTW, I think the detailed treatment of issues like this belongs in the GR page, and the R page should just link to it. [[User:PatrickD|PatrickD]] 12:01, 15 November 2009 (EST)
::The sequence of events basically goes like this:
::*Light is like little cannonballs! (Pretty much everybody from the 11th c. forward.)
::*Gravity is a constant force! (In India and Arabia, 9th c. or so, in Europe, Galileo, early 17th c.)
::*Gravity varies with the square of the distance! (Newton, late 17th c.)
::*There are stars so heavy that light cannonballs from them are dragged back down! (Laplace et al., 18th c.)
::*Guys? Light's not cannonballs, it's vibration. So no on your gravity nonsense. (Various, late 17th c. through mid 19th c.)
::*Okay, you guys are both right. It's cannonballs that vibrate. Kind of. (Einstein, early 20th c.)
::*Oh, and gravity does so pull on it. So nyeh. (Einstein, early 20th c. but slightly later.)
::Basically the question of how light and gravity interact has been bounced back and forth like a ping-pong ball for the past thousand years. Only in the past century has a consistent model of light and gravitation emerged. Some discussion of this exists already [[black hole|here]]. --[[User:KSorenson|KSorenson]] 12:20, 15 November 2009 (EST)