"Double-A" wrote in message...
...

From the book "The Riddle of Gravity" by Einstein's colleague at
Princeton, Peter G. Bergmann:

"The advance of the perihelion of Mercury was considered a settled
matter in 1915 when Einstein derived from hs thoery ... "

"The excellence of this zgreement has been called into question by
Dicke" (Robert H. Dicke of Princeton).

"According to Dicke, the scaler-tensor theory leads to a slightly
different rate of perihelion advance than Einstein's original theory,
the difference amounting to about one tenth of Einstein's value."

WHOOPS!

The book goes on to say that possible oblateness of the Sun might be
responsible for part of Mercury's perihelion advance. Studies have
been done, but with no conclusiive results.

This just goes to show that nothing is nailed down, as the textbook
bangers would say.

I still like to pin my hopes on the exixtence of Vulcan as a partial
explanation. There is no one better poised to discover Vulcan than
David Tholen in his current survey of objects inside of Mercury's
orbit. He might be the first in 100 years to view Vulcan as it comes
out of the glare of the Sun! And that will prove it is not an
invisible planet as the astrologers claim. (Though it would be
interesting if they were right and it turns out to be a dark matter
planet!)

Live long and prosper, Dave!

Double-A

This is an example of experimenters experiencing a larger
window of tolerance than hoped for, and yet still accepting
the 10% as "close enough" to substantiate the theory. I
myself think this is acceptable. Einstein did not hit a home
run in several parameters of several experiments. But
where Newton got to second base, Einstein effectively made
it to third!

And Dicke himself, while striving to disprove Einstein's work,
gave experimental relativity sufficient credibility so as to do
the reverse. And modern experiments have decreased those
larger windows of tolerance giving more and more credence
to GR.

As for Vulcan? DA, you just might be pinning your hopes to
a pipe dream. Don't you think that the position of Vulcan
based on its possible influence upon Mercury has been being
followed precisely ever since the mid 50's when Dicke started
raising hell? And alas, no physical planet has yet to show up
in that mythical planetary orbit within the orbit of Mercury.
Don't you think it would have been found many years ago if
it does indeed exist?

happy days and...
starry starry nights!

--
Indelibly yours,
Paine

P.S. Thank YOU for reading!

P.P.S. Some secret sites (shh)...
http://painellsworth.net
http://savethechildren.org
http://eBook-eDen.secretsgolden.com