From: utzoo!utcsrgv!donald
Newsgroups: net.physics
Title: Re: the spinning ant and Ernst Mach
Article-I.D.: utcsrgv.526
Posted: Sat Aug 14 12:33:24 1982
Received: Sat Aug 14 14:29:26 1982
References: uwvax.551


Re: Doug's reply to my reply to my reply...

Who is this Davies person???  As far as I can tell, many physicists accept
the General Theory (although the subject is far from closed), which incor-
portates Mach's Principle.  In every General Relativity text I've seen
(layman's and technical) the problem of Newton's bucket (a.k.a. the spinning
ant) is explained in terms of Mach's Principle, i.e. the inertial forces on
the water/ant are due to gravitational potential caused by the rest of
the cosmos spinning.  In the last century Mach's Principle was a more or
less qualitative argument, but with the advent of General Relativity and
Sciama in the 50's, it was put on a quantitative basis.


As an aside, does everybody think that exchanges such as these replies to
replies to replies should be conducted via mail?  It seems that a lot of
network traffic is being devoted to issues which are better solved by
referring to physics texts, and perhaps not everyone is interested in
spinning ants?

						Don Chan