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© Copyright 2002 – 2009
Michael Edward McNeil
Impearls: Copernicus Dethroned
Item page — this may be a chapter or subsection of a larger work. Click on link to access entire piece.
Earthdate 2004-04-29
| Copernicus Dethroned |
Stimulated by NASA's Gravity B probe which went up the other day, designed to further test Albert Einstein's general theory of relativity,
People often recall from undergraduate physics that Einstein's
We arrive at a very satisfactory interpretation of this law of experience, if we assume that the systems
K andK′ are physically exactly equivalent, that is, if we assume that we may just as well regard the systemK as being in a space free from gravitational fields, if we then regardK as uniformly accelerated. This assumption of exact physical equivalence makes it impossible for us to speak of the absolute acceleration of the system of reference, just as the usual theory of relativity forbids us to talk of the absolute velocity of a system; and it makes the equal falling of all bodies in a gravitational field seem a matter of course.
Under general relativity, it's just as valid and “true” to consider the universe as rotating once a day about a fixed and stationary Earth (i.e., the Ptolemaic universe), as it is to regard a rotating Earth revolving about a Sun within a more or less stationary universe (the Copernican system).
When it is Earth that is considered motionless, it's
[To Ernst Mach, concerning confirmation at an upcoming eclipse]
… If so, then your happy investigations on the foundations of mechanics, Planck's unjustified criticism notwithstanding, will receive brilliant confirmation. For it necessarily turns out that inertia originates in a kind of interaction between bodies, quite in the sense of your considerations on Newton's pail experiment. The first consequence is on p. 6 of my paper. The following additional points emerge: (1) If one accelerates a heavy shell of matterS , then a mass enclosed by that shell experiences an accelerative force. (2) If one rotates the shell relative to the fixed stars about an axis going through its center, a Coriolis force arises in the interior of the shell; that is, the plane of a Foucault pendulum is dragged around (with a practically unmeasurably small angular velocity).
It's just this kind of general relativistic “frame dragging” that the new Gravity B experiment is designed to investigate.
Moreover, it's this sort of
1
A. Einstein, 1911, “Über den Einfluss der Schwerkraft auf die Ausbreitung des Lichtes,”
2
“Albert Einstein's appreciation of Mach, written to Ernst Mach June 25, 1913, while Einstein was working hard at arriving at the final November 1915 formulation of standard general relativity.”
Quoted in
Charles W. Misner, Kip S. Thorne, John Archibald Wheeler,
Labels: Albert Einstein, astronomy, Copernican Universe, Copernicus, Ernst Mach, general relativity, gravity, Niels Bohr, physics science, Ptolemaic Universe, Ptolemy, reference frames, scientific theories
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