Motion Of Celestial Bodies Research Articles

Newcomb's Paradox Realized with Backward Causation

In order to refute the widely held belief that the game known as 'Newcomb's paradox' is physically nonsensical and impossible to imagine (e.g. because it involves backward causation), I tell a story in which the game is realized in a classical, deterministic universe in a physically plausible way. The predictor is a collection of beings which are by many orders of magnitude smaller than the player and which can, with their exquisite measurement techniques, observe the particles in the player's body so accurately that they can predict his choice (in much the same way as we can predict the motion of celestial bodies). I argue that the player, by choosing whether to take only one box or both boxes, influences whether or not, in the past, the predictor put a million pounds into the second box. Yet, I establish that no causal paradox can arise in this set-up.

Relativistic Considerations for Precession and Nutation

AbstractThe whole scope of problems related with the rotational motion of celestial bodies is briefly discussed. Relativistic modeling of the Earth rotation is considered from a conceptual point of view. Relativistic effects in rotational equations of motion of an extended body in general relativity are discussed. Numerical values of the effects are given.

Generalization of Encke's Method and its Application to the Orbital and Rotational Motions of Celestial Bodies

view Abstract Citations (22) References (23) Co-Reads Similar Papers Volume Content Graphics Metrics Export Citation NASA/ADS Generalization of Encke's Method and its Application to the Orbital and Rotational Motions of Celestial Bodies Fukushima, Toshio Abstract Encke' s method was generalized to a dynamical system with a linear approximate solution. Its superiority to the classical Encke's method was shown analytically for two kinds of perturbed harmonic oscillators. The method was applied to the orbital and rotational motions of celestial bodies expressed in terms of the orbital elements and new sets of variables. Numerical simulations showed that the new formulations reduce integration errors significantly. When compared to the existing schemes, the gain in precision by the new method reaches 3 to 9 digits while the required computational labor remains almost the same. Publication: The Astronomical Journal Pub Date: September 1996 DOI: 10.1086/118097 Bibcode: 1996AJ....112.1263F Keywords: CELESTIAL MECHANICS; METHODS: NUMERICAL full text sources ADS |

Activities: Where Are We?

Humans have been observing the motion of celestial bodies for thousands of years. This ancient knowledge coupled with the relatively recent introduction of latitude and longitude enables us to devise a simple procedure for determining our exact location on Earth. The mathematics for this activity is accessible to high school students and can be integrated with astronomy, geography, and history.

Relativistic equations of motion of celestial bodies

The problem of relativistic equations of motion for extended celestial bodies in the first post-Newtonian approximation is reviewed. It is argued that the problems dealing with kinematical aspects have been solved in a satisfactory way, but more work has to be done on the dynamical side. Concepts like angular velocity, moments of inertia, Tisserand axes etc. still have to be introduced in a rigorous manner at the 1PN level.

Stars and seasons in Southern Africa

Although the indigenous people of Southern Africa traditionally viewed the sky as a place quite apart from the Earth, they believed celestial phenomena to be natural signs united with those of the Earth in a harmonious synchronicity. There is no substantial evidence that the precolonial Africans imagined a casual relationship between celestial bodies and the seasonal patterns of life on Earth. They did, however, recognize a coincidental relationship. The traditional African cosmos, then, worked as a noetic principle unifying the observed motions of celestial bodies, the sequence of seasons, and the behavior of plants and animals. Such a cosmos, with local peculiarities, was widely understood in Southern Africa before the end of the last century. By the early 20th century European colonial paradigms had largely obliterated this African worldview. This paper will offer a partial reconstruction. Pre-colonial South African people viewed time as a sequence of discrete natural events; through annual repetition these events served as a guide for proper human action. The South Africans analyzed the passage of time in terms of the motions of celestial bodies, the maturation of beneficial plants, and the mating patterns of animals. The rightful course of human life was seen to fit within the seasonal context of these natural phenomena. The visibility of conspicuous stars and asterisms marked significant times of year. For instance, the Lovedu people greeted the dawn rising of Canopus with joy: “The boy has come out.” The star was a signal for rainmaking and boys' initiation ceremonies to proceed. The Venda constellation Thutlwa, the giraffes, comprises α and β Crucis and α and β Centauri. In October Thutlwa skims the trees of the evening horizon. The Venda Thutlwa literally means ‘rising above the trees,’ an allusion to the majestic vegetarian creatures and the stars advising the people to be done with their spring planting. This paper will describe stellar associations with other creatures: wild dogs, warthogs, wildebeests, swallows, cuckoos and cicadas. In each case the visibility of a star will synchronize with a behavior of the associated species. Together, stars and species informed man of the order and unity of an African cosmos — a worldview that must have been as satisfying as it was beautiful.

The Radial Motions of Celestial Bodies

The Radial Motions of Celestial Bodies

Truth in the science of man

AbstractWe are going to subject human beings to scientific analysis which can reach the level of genuine scientific theory. But before starting we really should turn to the question of what we mean by ‘Science’. To do this we have to plunge centuries back to unearth various theories about the characteristics of proposed sciences. Each of these theories appears to have centered on one particular domain of Nature. Each has earned a theoretical status, establishing abstract relations between objects of its domain in agreement with actual relations, deemed as truthful. For example, the periodic motion of celestial bodies led astronomers to conceive abstract relations, as a rational order in things expressed by the word ‘cosmos’. In this way each science finally made its particular domain intelligible. Thus the intellectual scope of Science is to make Nature intelligible to mankind. When we talk about ‘Nature’ we mean everything which has existed, everything which exists, and everything which will exist. There are no limits to this domain. Man, inasmuch as he is a living being can therefore become an object of scientific enquiry and therefore scientific theorizing. The object of the present paper is to ascertain the characteristics of scientific truth attached to such a theory. This analysis is particularly relevant at the present time as science appropriates an ever‐increasing share in the advance of civilization. The theory of man is a recent development. It has encountered great resistance. The fact that throughout and despite many centuries of development, Science has so far failed to make human beings intelligible to themselves should be attributed to such resistance. This suggests that probing into the scientific theory of Man might upset many established ‘truths’ current in science today. To know these ‘truths’, we must go back as far as we can in history and attempt to trace out how scientific truth has unfolded.

Moments of external disturbing forces in the rotational motion of celestial bodies

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Old and New Approaches in the Study of Gravitational Absorption

1. Many efforts, both theoretical and experimental, and astronomical studies on the motion of celestial bodies have been made in the past in an attempt to detect a possible effect of gravitational absorption. To the astronomical studies belongs Russell’s approach in which any celestial body is assumed to absorb a fraction of its own gravitation, which leads to the nonproportionality of inertial and gravitational masses and to the failure of Kepler’s third law (Russell 1921). Following a similar approach, Bottlinger considered the perturbations due to gravitational lunar eclipses on the Moon’s motion, assuming the Sun as the gravitational source, the Earth as the screen and the Moon as the probe (Bottlinger 1912). In laboratory experimentation, Majorana’s research is to be mentioned, aiming at the determination of an upper limit of the absorption coefficient, assuming the Earth as the gravitational source, a very sensitive balance as the detector, and heavy masses as screens (Majorana 1919). Worth mentioning is Tomaschek’s research in which gravity meters are used to detect a possible non-symmetric distribution of the tidal forces assuming the Moon as the source and the Earth as the screen (Tomaschek 1954). In the same approach an upper limit of the absorption coefficient has been determined assuming the Sun as the source and the Moon as the screen during total solar eclipses using gravity meters and horizontal pendulums as sensors (Caputo 1962). 2. The purpose of the present letter is to summarize an attempt to evaluate the absorptional effect assuming the Moon as the source, the Earth as the screen and an artificial satellite as the probe. It appears that the computed perturbations are very small and beyond the possibility of detection. In this attempt we have assumed that the gravitational effects are attenuated by the presence of interposed matter along the trajectory of the gravitational ‘ ray ’ according to the law

Social dissent in the East European political system

I am not the first to discover the pitfalls which surround the term ‘revolution’, as if to guard its explosive practical potency from scholarly vivisection. Eight years ago Hannah Arendt devoted more than three hundred pages of her-as usual-magnificent erudition to dissecting the elusive meaning of the term. She established that the term was used for the first time in 1688 to denote “bringing things back” rather than “pushing them forward”; she reminded us that when the duke de la Rochefoucauld-Liancourt, on July 14th, 1789, retorted bluntly: “Non, Sire, c'est une révolution” to the Louis XVI' abashed “C'est une révoke”, he had been inspired by the impressive inevitability of freshly discovered motions of celestial bodies, rather than by modish ideas of les philosophes du progrès All this said and done, Hannach Arendt ends up with one more partisan definition, which is exactly the result one could have expected. A quarter of century before this, Crane Brinton choose the seemingly most reasonable path of comparing four, historically well described, events, which nobody would refuse to call ‘revolutions’—only to show once againthat it is the theoretical assumption which shape the empirical data rather than the other way round. Only two years had elapsed at that time since the Henderson-Livingstone translation introduced the Pareto's concept of ‘equilibrium’ to the American scholarly scene. As it has not yet been turned by Talcott Parsons into a symbol of abstract academic sterility, the concept could have seemed to Brinton the right tool of selecting the ‘revolutionary essence’ from the host of ‘empirical data’ on revolutions.

Principles of Celestial Mechanics

P M Fitzpatrick London: Academic Press 1970 pp xvii + 405 price £5.95 This book, apart from the final chapter, is concerned with the positions and motions of celestial bodies, described by the use of the concept of the osculating ellipse, and perturbations of that ellipse. It differs from other textbooks of celestial mechanics, first in that the classical mechanics of particles and systems of particles is developed in some detail from first principles, and also in that the methods are developed quite specifically with artificial satellite motions in mind, with deliberate omission of many topics, important in the study of planetary motions, such as the determination of orbits from observed positions, the expansion of the planetary disturbing function, and the secular variations of planetary orbits.

A discussion of Halphen's method of secular perturbations and its application to the determination of long‐range effects in the motion of celestial bodies

The long‐range (secular) effects caused by the moon and the sun are of primary importance for establishing the stability of highly eccentric orbits of satellites. At present no complete analytical theory exists that can treat such orbits. In this paper Halphen's method of treating secular planetary effects is suggested also for the determination of long‐range lunar effects in the motion of artificial satellites, using step‐by‐step integration. Halphen's method permits the numerical integration of long‐range lunar effects over an interval of many years. The long‐range solar effects can be treated by averaging the disturbing function over the orbit of the satellite. Halphen's method is applicable to the determination of long‐range effects in the motion of minor planets over the interval of hundreds of thousands of years. We assume that no sharp commensurability between mean motions of the disturbed and disturbing bodies exists. A complete theory of Halphen's method is presented, using modern symbolics. Goursat transformations and a summability process are applied to speed up the convergence of series appearing in the theory.

On the electric charge of the sun

The chief forces which determine the motions of celestial bodies are due to the gravitation of their masses, according to the law of Newton. But besides these forces, which tend to concentrate matter, there exist others of a repulsive nature, as Kepler already observed regarding the comets' tails. As no other repelling forces were known than those between similarly electrified bodies, it was supposed that these forces were of electric origin, and especially Zöllner worked out this theory for explaining the form of the tails of the comets.These electric forces were nevertheless of a highly hypothetical nature, because no reason could be found why the Sun and the particles of the comets' tails should be charged electrically. Therefore the astrophysicists were gratified when a new repelling force, namely, that of the pressure of radiation, which is a consequence of the theories of Maxwell and Bartoli, was introduced for the explanation of the observed repulsions between celestial bodies. According to these theories, the radiation from the Sun would be sufficient to exert a pressure against a totally reflecting spherical drop of 1.5 μ diameter, which would balance its gravity if the drop had a specific weight like that of water. Drops of this magnitude ought, therefore, to swim in the atmosphere of the Sun, just as if they had no weight at all. Bigger drops ought to fall down to the Sun, whereas smaller ones ought to be repelled from it.

SOME LARGE PERTURBATIONS IN THE MOTIONS OF CELESTIAL BODIES

SOME LARGE PERTURBATIONS IN THE MOTIONS OF CELESTIAL BODIES