Abstract
If Newton’s theory was incapable of correctly accounting for planetary motions down to their smallest measurable details, how was the theory to be altered? It did not take astronomers and physicists long to see that nothing could be gained by just making a slight change in some of the numbers that appear in Newton’s formula, for example, changing the exponent from 2 to 2.0000001 in his law of gravity. This does bring Mercury’s motion into step with the theory, but then the rest of the army is out of step; the motions of all of the other planets are thrown into disagreement with the theory.
Nothing puzzles me more than time and space; and yet nothing troubles me less, as I never think about them.
—CHARLES LAMB, Letter to T. Manning
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© 1989 Lloyd Motz and Jefferson Hane Weaver
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Motz, L., Weaver, J.H. (1989). The Special Theory of Relativity. In: The Unfolding Universe. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4899-5982-9_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4899-5982-9_4
Publisher Name: Springer, Boston, MA
Print ISBN: 978-0-306-43264-4
Online ISBN: 978-1-4899-5982-9
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