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Talk:Theory of relativity (view source)
Revision as of 05:17, September 5, 2018
, 05:17, September 5, 2018→Numbers for claims about Mercury's precession.
:But keep in mind that the real test is whether the precession ''as observed through telescopes'' and the precession ''as precisely calculated from the Einstein field equations and the Schwartzschild metric'' agree. That's what the error bars are about. The two approximations are just that. You need to solve the equations, and (unlike for Newtonian/Keplerian gravity) that has to be done by computer.
:But keep in mind that the real test is whether the precession ''as observed through telescopes'' and the precession ''as precisely calculated from the Einstein field equations and the Schwartzschild metric'' agree. That's what the error bars are about. The two approximations are just that. You need to solve the equations, and (unlike for Newtonian/Keplerian gravity) that has to be done by computer.
:So I'll look at that and try to clean it up. And not have one of the approximations in the text while another is in a footnote. That's just dumb. Thanks for pointing out the problem. [[User:SamHB|SamHB]] ([[User talk:SamHB|talk]]) 16:32, 4 September 2018 (EDT)
:So I'll look at that and try to clean it up. And not have one of the approximations in the text while another is in a footnote. That's just dumb. Thanks for pointing out the problem. [[User:SamHB|SamHB]] ([[User talk:SamHB|talk]]) 16:32, 4 September 2018 (EDT)
::I've looked it over, and I "sort of" stand by my original formulas. I think things are confused by the symbol "a". In modern relativity textbooks that's the Schwartzschild radius, (also know as the "gravitating radius") but in Einstein's paper it was the semi-major axis of the ellipse. (You remember a and b being the semi-major and semi-minor axes of an ellipse from high school, right? That's what Einstein was using.) Now the reason I say "sort of" is that my supposedly nice approximation of <math>\frac{3GM}{c^2 a(1-e^2)}</math> was already simplified, by me, from what was in Einstein's paper. And that was an approximation in any case. The only way to get the really precise theoretical prediction is to solve numerically for a geodesic, by computer. Thet's what the Pijpers paper is comparing with the experimental measurements. [[User:SamHB|SamHB]] ([[User talk:SamHB|talk]]) 01:17, 5 September 2018 (EDT)
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