Talk:Newtonian motivations for general relativity

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[edit] Suggestions for improvement

Hi, Roger (thanks for registering, BTW!). I appreciate your attempt to ease the transition from Newtonian gravity to gtr, but I have some suggestions for improvement:

  1. Fix the obvious format problem near top of page, perhaps by simply removing the Earth template entirely (do you really need all that data?)
  2. This means that objects close to each other in space and moving together with the same velocity continue to co-move with each other. This allows us to think of gravity as a curvature of spacetime doesn't really help the desired audience, I think.
  3. "Tests for flatness" similarly (maybe you aren't done?).
  4. The field equation for Newtonian gravitition is the Poisson equation, not the Ricci scalar equation you wrote down. And a much more direct route, more in keeping with MTW, is to compute the tidal acceleration of nearby radially falling test particles near the Earth, as I did in tidal tensor. This is of course ultimately equivalent to what you wrote, but I think the planned exposition of how Fermi normal coordinates relate to the Bel decomposition will bring all this out much more clearly.
  5. "potential well" for orbiting spacecraft: did you confuse this with tidal accelerations? Please note that I have computed the correct tidal acclerations for a Hagihara observer in a stable circular orbit about a Schwarzschild orbit in Frame_fields_in_general_relativity.
  6. Coplanar elliptical orbits: nice idea, nice figures, but format problem.
  7. Tip: use <math>\cos</math> etc. for trig functions.
  8. Overall, the present version is too disorganized and confusing for the intended audience. Maybe some of this can be carefully merged with the existing article on (Newtonian) tidal tensor?

Hope this helps ---CH 03:54, 27 February 2006 (UTC)

CH, I incorporated a number of your suggestions. Complexica 17:33, 28 February 2006 (UTC)

Afterthought: since gtr is not quite founded on Newtonian gravitation, how about moving this to something like Newtonian motivations for general relativity? Not sure this is quite right either, but maybe it will suggest an even better title.---CH 04:39, 25 March 2006 (UTC)

done Complexica 17:45, 10 August 2006 (UTC)