Talk:Whitehead's theory of gravitation

Stub

At present, this is a stub since I haven't yet added material precisely describing Whitehead's theory or explaining the effects mentioned in the article.---CH 00:29, 20 February 2006 (UTC)

Students beware

I created the original version of this article and had been monitoring it for bad edits, but I am leaving the WP and am now abandoning this article to its fate.

Just wanted to provide notice that I am only responsible (in part) for the last version I edited; see User:Hillman/Archive. I emphatically do not vouch for anything you might see in more recent versions. Alternative theories of gravitation attract many cranks, so it is possible that at least some future versions of this article might contain slanted information, misinformation, or disinformation. I'd also urge students to be cautious in using any material from websites found by following external links from this article, since these may be cranky. Note that cranks may attempt to portray fringe science or pseudoscience as belonging to the canon of well-established scientific belief, which would be seriously misleading.

Good luck in your search for information, regardless!---CH 20:02, 1 July 2006 (UTC)

Poor interpretation of Whitehead's philosophical point

It seems to me that the first several sentences describing the principle features of Whitehead's theory are quite false. According to Dean Fowler (from the academic journal Process Studies), "Whitehead, while maintaining a uniform geometry, did not claim that the geometrical structure is prior. Whitehead, in fact, emphasizes that geometry is an outgrowth of the relationships among actual events. That is, actual occasions are ontologically prior to geometry." This first sentence claiming otherwise is parroting the arguments of Will and Synge, who clearly did not understand Whitehead's philosophical reasons for criticizing Einstein's version of relativity. In point of fact, at least according to Whitehead, it is Einstein who makes abstract geometry more real than or prior to actual nature. http://www.religion-online.org/showarticle.asp?title=2373 footnotes2plato.com (talk) 07:39, 1 September 2012 (UTC)

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Undue weight in body

The tone of this article is a little bit too much WP:FALSEBALANCE. The critical statements made by physicists are put up against supportive statements by a philosopher, and a 50 year old study. This really is not a live theory anymore, and the article shouldn't imply there is a serious debate.

The closest thing I can find to current scientific support for Whitehead's theory is papers like this, which is published in a questionable journal, and yet is talking about an extension, meaning it still acknowledges that Whitehead's theory has been proven wrong:

"The GR prediction was proven right, beyond any doubt, in the careful observations of the pulsar B1913+16 by Hulse and Taylor [9,10]. Anisotropy in the gravitational constant, violations of the weak equivalence principle and Birkhoff’s theorem have also been invoked as irrecoverable inconsistencies with experience in Whitehead’s model [10]."

There may be proposed extensions to the model that have not been proven wrong, but we should clearly specify those are modified proposals, and not (as the article currently says) a "new interpretation" of the same theory. $\langle$ Forbes₇₂ | Talk $\rangle$ 19:20, 31 March 2020 (UTC)

What's the theory?

Why doesn't the article say what the theory *is*? It can't be that hard to quickly give a precise specification.

This sentence is very odd:

In 1971, young Clifford M. Will thanks Ni Wei-To to comprehend Whitehead's theory[9] and claims that the theory makes predictions concerning ordinary ocean tides on Earth (suggested to him by Jim Peebles) which are in violent disagreement with observation (specifically, the theory predicts a "sidereal tide", induced by the gravitational field of the Milky Way, which is hundreds of times stronger than the solar and lunar tides) which immediately nullified this theory.

"Young Clifford M. Will"?

"Thanks Ni Wei-To to comprehend"? - maybe that was written by a non-native speaker.

John Baez (talk) 05:45, 7 September 2020 (UTC)

John Baez, here's the description in Chiang and Hamity (1975):

The theory is set up in a Minkowski space-time of the special theory of relativity (the reference space) with metric tensor $\eta _{ab}=\mathrm {diag} (1,-1,-1,-1)$, $a,b=0,1,2,3$. The basic physical laws are formulated (a priori) only in these reference systems. The particles of a gravitating system have masses $m_{a}$. The Minkowski arc length of particle $A$ is denoted by $\tau _{A}$. Consider an event $p$ with co-ordinates $\chi ^{a}$. A retarded event $p_{A}$ with co-ordinates $\chi _{A}^{a}$ on the world-line of particle $A$ is defined by the relations $(y_{A}^{a}=\chi ^{a}-\chi _{A}^{a},y_{A}^{a}y_{Aa}=0,y_{A}^{0}>0)$. The unit tangent vector at $p_{A}$ is $\lambda _{A}^{a}=(dx_{A}^{a}/d\tau _{A})p_{A}$. We also need the invariants $w_{A}=y_{A}^{a}\lambda _{Aa}$. Then, a gravitational tensor potential is defined by

$g_{ab}=\eta _{ab}-h_{ab},$

where

$h_{ab}=2\sum _{A}{\frac {m_{A}}{w_{A}^{3}}}y_{Aa}y_{Ab}.$

The motion of a test particle is properly described by a geodesic equation in the physical space-time with metric $g_{ab}$.

I did some work several weeks ago to improve the prose of this article. As I recall, I lost energy before deciding what notation would be clearest for a more detailed explanation, and then I got diverted by other things. XOR'easter (talk) 19:42, 28 November 2020 (UTC)

Thanks. If you add this to the article, it will at least give some description of Whitehead's theory! People can improve it as time goes by. John Baez (talk) 22:15, 29 November 2020 (UTC)