Science, Physics, Relativity, Faq's and Feedback
This homepage is now roughly 6 years old and it is time to give an overview of I have reached my objectives.
10 years ago I wrote a book called "The Reality, Now and Understanding". For an introduction see NOW. In this book I explained that it is possible to simulate the total forward movement of the planet Mercury, including the famous 43 arc per century angle, by using Newton's Law and with the assumption that the speed of gravity does not act instantaneous but has a value of roughly 300km/sec.
This assumption is wrong. The purpose of this homepage is to chalenge this simulation and to see if other solutions are possible including General Relativity.
Each simulation uses two concepts: Initial Conditions and a Theory.
However and that is even more important, you need Observations. Observations come in two flavours: Past Observations and Future Observations or Predicted Observations.
A Theory is a description of the Physical Reality using mathematics. A Theory is very often a set of differential equation. To solve those equations you need initial conditions.
Differential equations include parameters. In order to calculate those you need Observations. The same problem exists for initial conditions. For both the values of the parameters and for the initial conditions you need (Past) Observations.
What is important to consider is that when those observations change, when more accurate values are become available both (the parameters and the initial conditions) change.
A full or complete theory is a theory which includes all the tools to calculate all its parameters based on observations.
A case in point is the mass of an object. If you want to use Newton's Law as a theory you have to identify how to calculate the mass of an object based on observations using Newton's Law.
The state of the art is to use General Realtivity in order to make a full simulation of the movement of the planets around the Sun. However I doubt if anyone has done that ie to use only GR. Using GR only implies that you have to calculate all the (field) parameters used using GR. You can not use any other theory. You can only use other theories in order to calculate estimated or initial values of those parameters.
The best article to study GR is "Numerical Relativity: A review" http://lanl.arXiv.org/abs/gr-qc/?0106072 Author: Luis Lehner
This document discusses at page 5 the concept of "Suitable Coordinates."
Suppose as a coordinate system we use our Galaxy. The point (x,y,z)=(0,0,0) being the centre of our Galaxy. The time will be a clock at this centre. The z axis being the axis of rotation of our Galaxy.
If you make such an assumption than immediate the following question pops up in order to simulate the movement of all the planets around the Sun: Using such an assumption is it possible to simplify the Einstein Equations?
At the link GR contest I have setup a contest to write a simulation using GR. Until now no entry was received using GR. I'am not amazed.
I think it is impossible, to use Special Relativity as a theory, in order to do a full simulation of our planets around the Sun. That does not mean that possible implications of SR have to be neglected before hand. SR takes into account that the length, time and mass of moving objects change relative to a fixed time frame ie a time frame at rest.
However if you start from the coordinate system which is linked to the centre of our Galaxy, as suggested above, and you keep the clock at rest in the centre, than the concept of time dilation is not applicable.
Chaos Theory
The biggest problem with the Chaos Theory is that it is not clearly defined. To claim that each simulation depents on the initial conditions is true, but as explained above, so do all the parameters used.
IMO the concept of chaos does not have to be taken into account when you want to simulate the planets.
What is important, in any simulation, are the observations from which the parameters and the intial conditions are derived.
Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle
The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle or HUP tells us that if you want to measure the position of a particle accurately than you cannot measure the momentum of that particle accurately. On the other hand if you want to measure the position of that particle less accurate than you can measure the momemtum of that particle more accurate and vice versa
This is expressed by the formula dx * dp is less than h/2*pi.
With dx being the error in position and dp being the error in momemtum.
vice versa means that if you want to measure the momemtum of a particle accurately than you cannot measure the position of that particle accurately, and if you want to measure the momemtum of that particle less accurate than you can measure the position of that particle more accurate.
The question is how do you measure the momemtum of a particle, specific how do you measure the momemtum accurate versus not accurate. The problem is, and that is the weak point, you can not. There is no way to prove by experiment the HUP.
Dark Matter
Last modified: 13 May 2002
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