Talk:Gravitational well

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

	Portal This article is within the scope of WikiProject Physics, which collaborates on articles related to physics.
Start	This article has been rated as Start-Class on the assessment scale.
???	This article has not yet received an importance rating within physics.
Help with this template This article has been rated but has no comments. If appropriate, please review the article and leave comments here to identify the strengths and weaknesses of the article and what work it will need.

3D? In the terms of Physics everything in our universe experiances time, and time being the fourth dimension means that everything in the universe is fourth dimensional. So, shouldn't the article say 4 dimensional? --Science Lord 13:40, 23 March 2006 (UTC)

Well, in Newtonian mechanics, and for most purposes where the concept of a gravity well is relevant, it's perfectly fine to ignore the relativistic effects, and then calling time a dimension or not is pure semantics. Adding a new section to the article on relativistic implications might be reasonable, but the intro should avoid the subject for clarity purposes. Evand 14:01, 23 March 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Poor style and content

This article is very poorly written with regards to scientific and mathematic exactness: "an extrusion of an otherwise 2-dimensional sheet", "time slows down to the point where it is not noticeably moving" are not phrases that belong in an encyclopedia without qualification (and even as an analogy these phrases are more misleading than helpful). The entire last paragraph sounds like it's lifted from a cheap SF novel.

I would urge a complete rewrite, or rather a deletion and redirection of the term to some existing article (e.g. Gravity). Thomas 19:51, 6 July 2007 (UTC)

[edit] external/internal gravitational potential

well, at the 3d-center of any spherical mass with radius R, gravity is zero, everyone knows.
and it sure stays differentiable around and at R.
so what does a gravity well cross-section really look like?
--Tobyvoss (talk) 17:23, 14 February 2008 (UTC)

I don't understand the question. The cross section shown in the article is differentiable everywhere, and the derivative (acceleration vector) at the center is zero. -- BenRG (talk) 00:28, 15 February 2008 (UTC)

ah thanks for the explanation with the acceleration vector, i wasn't thinking... --Tobyvoss (talk) 10:52, 15 February 2008 (UTC)