Decoding Mercury's Anomalous Precession: Discovering Pre-GR Explanations | [url]

[dr_venturi]

Does anyone know if anybody had successfully explained mercury’s anomalous precession before GR? The reason I ask is that I recently ran across this paper online. It seems to easy to not have been done after SR but prior to GR.

Link: http://toe.sytes.net:65333/planetary precession.pdf

 

[bcrowell]

This is a kook paper. Special relativity is not compatible with Newtonian gravity for a variety of well known reasons (e.g., you can't have instantaneous propagation of gravitational forces). Even if the paper's claim were correct, it would be pointless, because GR has been subjected to many other tests, such as gravitational time dilation, which is incompatible with SR. If GR was wrong, your GPS unit wouldn't work. Note that the physics references that the paper cites are ones that either have not been published in peer-reviewed journals or are to papers in Foundations of Physics from before 2007, when it routinely published kook papers.