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Talk:Essay:Quantifying Order (view source)
Revision as of 01:35, November 15, 2009
, 01:35, November 15, 2009Are you thinking of solar oblateness maybe?
:You make an interesting point about position, but I don't think the essay is incorrect because it says nothing about momentum. Observation can pin down the position, which is relevant to establishing order. But without observation there is disorder. That is the basic point.--[[User:Aschlafly|Andy Schlafly]] 20:11, 14 November 2009 (EST)
:You make an interesting point about position, but I don't think the essay is incorrect because it says nothing about momentum. Observation can pin down the position, which is relevant to establishing order. But without observation there is disorder. That is the basic point.--[[User:Aschlafly|Andy Schlafly]] 20:11, 14 November 2009 (EST)
::Right, but there's an error of fact buried in there. It's a totally innocent one, I'm sure; I'm not accusing you of axe-grinding. It's just that the precession of the perihelion of Mercury ''has not changed'' since 1916 when the theory was published. It's not that we measured it with telescopes before 1916 and got a rough estimate, and now we measure it with better telescopes and have a much more precise figure. We measured it before 1916 and got a very accurate figure because measuring the motion of Mercury just isn't that hard, and the measurements we make today with better telescopes say only that yup, the older measurements were pretty much spot on.
::What we ''have'' done since then is to much more precisely measure the oblateness of the sun. There was a big controversy about that back in the … hmm … 80s I think it was? Goldberg and Dicke claimed that the sun was much "fatter" than previously thought, which ''would have'' made the predictions from general relativity different from the observed precession. Maybe that's what you're thinking of? For a while there was a lot of disagreement about what shape the sun actually is, but that's been pretty much put to bed with both more accurate ground-based observations in the 90s and helioseismography.
::Anyway, saying that the prediction matched the observation in 1916 and doesn't today is simply flat-out false. If your argument depends on it, then you're hurting your argument with this point. If it doesn't, then what's the harm in fixing it?
::Thanks for clarifying your point about quantum mechanics. --[[User:KSorenson|KSorenson]] 20:35, 14 November 2009 (EST)