Re: All answers to C S Lewis

al <almond@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> <carlip-nospam@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
> news:dq9105$ku9$1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
>> al <almond@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

[...]
> Do any of your above references refer specifically to the perihelion of
> Mercury? You have failed to make this clear.

You are the one who referred to Campbell et al, "The Sun's Quadrupole
Moment and Perihelion Precession of Mercury," Nature 305 (1983) 508.
Assuming you read your own reference, you know that its claim was that
the general relativistic prediction did not properly take into account
the Sun's quadrupole moment, that is, its slightly nonspherical shape
and mass distribution, and that because of this the prediction was off
by about 1%. You might, therefore, logically expect that the papers

>> Kuhn et al., "The Sun's Shape and Brightness," Nature 392 (1998) 155
>> Pijpers, "Helioseismic determination of the solar gravitational
>> quadrupole moment," MNRAS 297 (1998) L76
>> Lydon and Sofia, "A Measurement of the Shape of the Solar Disk,"
>> Phys. Rev. Lett. 76 (1996) 177

might have something to do with this. You'd be right: these three papers,
involving much more accurate measurements of the shape of the Sun, show
that the quadrupole moment assumed in your Nature reference was too high by
a factor of about ten. For your further information, the papers by Pijpers
and by Lydon and Sofia refer specifically to implications for Mercury's
perihelion. (Kuhn et al. is mainly a description of the observational
results rather than the interpretation, but refers back to Lydon and Sofia
for implications.)

When you read my statement that

>> And fits to planetary orbits have *also* vastly improved, in part
>> because of the accumulation of much more data. See, for example,
>> Pitjeva, Astronomy Letters 31 (2005) 340

you might also have logically concluded, given the context, that "fits
to planetary orbits" included a fit to Mercury's orbit. You'd again be
right. The effects of a Solar quadrupole moment and those of general
relativity depend on distance in different ways, so by looking at the
orbits of a collection of planets and asteroids at different distances
from the Sun, you can separate out the two. Pitjeva does this.

The other references I gave,

>> Robertson et al., Nature 349 (1991) 768 (74 radio sources,
>> over 300,000 VLBI observations; fitting not just deflection
>> at the limb of the Sun, but the amount and functional form
>> of deflection as a function of distance from the limb; standard
>> error of .2%)
>> Lebach et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 75 (1995) 1439 (VLBI
>> measurements of two extragalactic radio sources at three
>> frequencies; a total of over 20,000 measurements; standard
>> error of less than .2%)
>> Shapiro et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 92 (2004) 121101 (results from
>> 2500 24-hour VLBI sessions over 20 years, with 87 VLBI sites
>> and 541 radio sources; standard error of .04%)

are not about Mercury's perihelion, but rather about your claims of
problems with the general relativistic prediction of deflection of
light by the Sun. As I said, Robertson et al. and Shapiro et al. look
at large numbers of sources along lines of sight that pass quite far
from the Sun, for which the general relativistic deflection is smaller
but still present. This eliminates any possibility that the effects
have anything to do with the Sun's limb, the corona, etc.

Incidentally, you can read at least the abstracts to most of these
papers through ADS, http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abstract_service.html.
I suggest that you do that.

Steve Carlip

.

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