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