Mercury's Precession Better Explained By Newtonian Tidal Effects Than GR?

This is convincing mathematical research into the idea: GENERAL RELATIVITY or NEWTONIAN TIDAL EFFECTS?. Quote:

Can anyone find significant fault with this major piece of work?

 

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His references are to a slew of his own unpublished work, done a decade ago but failed to get published, and a bunch of New Scientist, Scientific American or Nature articles, not exactly a good sign that he has a firm grasp of GR. Binary neutron star spin down times have been measured and found to agree with GR. I also find it odd that he thinks creation was 6000 years ago, going so far as to consider that an exact value and he tries to tie a little too much in with Bible records.

His maths is bad, his claims inconsistent and his overly Biblical interpretations laughable. He, like you, seems to think a good set of references are unpublished BS and pop science magazines. What is it with cranks and the inability to read such places as www.arxiv.org ? If you view his work as 'convincing mathematical research' then you really are very naive about what 'convincing mathematical research' actually involves. Have a look at the maths section of ArXiv.

 

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Convincing to whom?

 

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Hi everyone! Can you all say "obsession"?

 

I could show you my favourite obsession. I've been making a man with blond hair and a tan And he's good for relieving my tension

 

Riiight.

The height of the tides raised on a fluid body (e.g., the Sun, or the Earth's oceans) by an orbiting body is proportional to the mass of the orbiting body but is inversely proportional to the distance between the centers of the two bodies and is inversely proportional to the gravitational acceleration at the surface of the primary body. Put it all together and the tides raised by Mercury on the Sun are about 5×10[sup]-8[/sup] the height of the tides raised by the Moon on the Earth's oceans: Nanometer scale.

 

I'm not backing this guy incidentally, I just thought he had the right for a fair trial, that's all. The 6,000 year thing at the end should have been a dead give away I admit.

Gravtitational tide effects have an R3 (cubed) term I seem to remember.

 

He's been pushing his work for 10 years, don't you think that's enough time for him to have a fair trial, he doesn't need you posting links on forums, as you're hardly bringing it to the attention of the mainstream community.

 

Fair comment for once.

 

Correct. I included that power in my number but not in what I wrote.

Think about it for a second. Use your common sense. If the Earth was complete covered with water, the tides would be about 0.54 meters high. Mercury is about 4.5 times as massive as the Moon. If the Moon were as massive as is Mercury, the our ocean tides would be about 4.5 times higher than they actually are. That 0.54 meters would become 2.4 meters. That's nowhere near the 3045 feet (928 meters) tides claimed by this crackpot. Now add in the fact that the semi-major axis of Mercury's orbit about the Sun is about 151 times the semi-major axis of the Moon's orbit about the Earth. That reduces those 2.4 meter tides to 710 nanometers. Mercury isn't orbiting the Earth; it is orbiting the Sun. Surface gravity on the Sun is 32 g. Those 710 nanometer tides become 22 nanometers. 22 nanometers is just a tad smaller than 3045 feet.

 

Okay, oaky, okay was just checking, that's all. So the guy is wrong, I agree. What about a modified tidal theory though..

 

I don't want to annoy you on purpose D H, but I've found a more convincing paper on the concept of modified Newtonian tidal dynamics which reports results indistinguishable from GTR: Department of Physics, Khartoum.

 

You can always MAKE a theory work by adding enough parameters---in physics, we call this (affectionately) ``adding epicycles''. This is where Occam's Razor comes in. Two theories both predict the same phenomenon, with similar accuracies. We choose the theory which has fewer parameters OR the theory that makes more (correct) predictions. In this case, GR has both fewer parameters AND more correct predictions.

Now, on the face of it, the paper you linked to only changes one thing---they add a new term to Newton's law of gravitation. But now you also have to change a host of other things: gravitational lensing, for example, is now broken. For example, lines (26), (27), and (28) of the paper look pretty dubious to me---essentially, the author is claiming that gravitational lensing is predicted by Newton's theory.

Also, line (12) gives a correction to Newton's second law:
\(F = mg(1-\frac{6 R_e g}{c})\).
But, of course, we can test Newton's second law experimentally. So see if this theory is already ruled out by direct tests of gravity, which has been tested and confirmed at a length of 0.06 mm

The experiment I linked to parameterizes the variation by

\(U=\frac{G M m}{r}(1+\alpha e^{-r/\lambda} )\).

Then, let's take \( r = 0.06 mm = 6 \times 10^{-5} m\), and \(\lambda = 10^{-4}\). Now we can calculate that

\(\alpha e^{-r/\lambda} \sim 9 \times 10^{-27} \alpha\)

Great. What does the other theory predict? Take M = 1kg, r=0.06 mm. I find

\(3 \frac{GM}{c^2}\frac{1}{r^2} \sim \frac{1}{18}\times 10^{-17}\).

Now compare the two equations and solve for alpha:

\( 9 \alpha 10^{-27} \sim \frac{1}{36} 10^{-17}\)

This means that

\(\alpha \sim 10^8\).

Note that the point \(\lambda = 10^{-4}\) and \(\alpha = 10^8\) is already ruled out. So variations of the form that you linked to are ruled out by direct observation, which is the strongest way to rule something out.

 

The author used general relativity to derive the dipole moment. Only one problem: He didn't get it right. There is no dipole moment in the weak field post Newtonian approximation.

 

I've emailed the author in order for him to respond to your criticisms. Personally, I think that a modified Newtonian tidal explanation for Mercury's precession still has potential and shouldn't yet be ruled out so easily. It's not Einstein's maths that is the problem, but his mental picture of a fabric. You can't get away from the fact that the visual picture doesn't match quantum physics. A compromise looks like the only real answer to me.

 

The mental picture can't be the problem, because it is not a definitive description of the theory. At best, it is an approximation and a learning aid.

The maths is the real description of the theory. If there is no problem with the maths, then there's no problem with the theory.

 

I still can't see why a particle force-carrier imagery can't be used to the same effect.

 

As Ben mentioned, coming up with an ad hoc model that explains any one phenomenon is easy. In particular, a quadrupole model of the Sun's gravity field can be tuned to explain Mercury's anomalistic precession. So what? What motivates that model? Physicists do not like ad hoc models. More importantly, is that model going to explain anything but Mercury's anomalistic precession? Is it going to explain relativistic time dilation?

The only thing wrong with this picture is that you do not understand it. Tough. The universe is what it is, not what you want it to be. It's not as if those who advocate some modification to Newtonian dynamics are doing away with the concept of a fabric of space-time. They want to go back to the Newtonian fabric, where space-time is Euclidean. Guess what? Space-time is not Euclidean.

 

Newton was right when he unified celestial and terrestial mechanics. The author seeks to undo that.
Newton was right when he guessed light might be carried by a particle. The author seeks to undo that.
In claiming to support Newton, the author undermines Newton. This suggests the author has not actually understood Newton but only parrots a few results.
In revising Newton, Einstein did more to support Newton's worldview than the author who seeks to try to make Newton work for only isolated cases.

 

Would you care to explain how Newton's theory of gravitation is consistent with quantum mechanics?