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Re:Confronting the Credibility Gap for Crewed Exploration of... by XorNot on Wednesday December 21, 2016 @12:32AM (#13227018)
The Relativity of Wrong [http://chem.tufts.edu/answersinscience/relativityofwrong.htm]

Mercury's motion does violate Newtonian gravity. General Relativity however simplifies to Newtonian gravity for various low-dimension applications though (i.e. an Apple falling from a tree, the orbit of the moon for most astronomical guidance purposes over that distance etc.)

In much the same way we don't account for the curvature of the Earth when building a house's foundations.

That's my point though: when you violate a fundamental physical law, it can't just be wrong. You have to somehow also account for why it doesn't happen all the time elsewhere (i.e. the effect is small to within experimental error over common measurement cases) and by necessity the new theory to explain it has to encompass the predictions of the old i.e. the benefit of Newtonian gravity was that it easily recovers the behaviour of nested epicycles of orbital motion (and made new predictions successfully where epicycles could not).

Re:Confronting the Credibility Gap for Crewed Exploration of... by nonbel on Wednesday December 21, 2016 @12:10PM (#13230718)
>"General Relativity however simplifies to Newtonian gravity"

I still don't see how this is possible. In GR gravity travels at the speed of light, in Newtonian mechanics it is instantaneous. I have been unable to find an acceptable explanation for how these two very different universes can be compatible.

Re:Confronting the Credibility Gap for Crewed Exploration of... by Crespyl on Wednesday December 21, 2016 @02:37PM (#13231957)
I think the point is that they are compatible at sufficiently small scales.
Re:Confronting the Credibility Gap for Crewed Exploration of... by nonbel on Wednesday December 21, 2016 @03:17PM (#13232248)
You really cannot introduce any lag at all and have newtonian gravity work. Try it, the system will soon fly apart.