View Single Post
  #3 (permalink)  
Old 10-May-2008, 11:01 AM
Michael Noonan's Avatar
Michael Noonan Michael Noonan is offline
Senior Member
 
Join Date: Oct 2006
Location: Deep in thought
Posts: 1,628
Smile Are you prepared to look beyond just forces?

Quote:
Originally Posted by a-l-e-x View Post

Mysteriously, four spacecraft that flew past the Earth have each displayed unexpected anomalies in their motions.

These newfound enigmas join the so-called "Pioneer anomaly" as hints that unexplained forces may appear to act on spacecraft.
(my bold)
As I asked in the title to this post is the possibility of the anomaly limited only to unexplained forces?

The reason for this is that general relativity is well established to answer the nature of forces in what for most purposes could be calculated in static frames.

That leaves two further (possibly more) options and the first being that due to the velocity of the craft is there additional calculations required for dynamic changing reference frames ... which leads to the second option.

Yes I know I am a pain always coming back to this but ... is it space? Everything is explained in terms of geodesics or the stretch of space. Could there be a very slight underlying geodesic giving a layered effect to space which is only noticeable when the curvature is traversed at speed or calculated over time interval?
__________________
"Nature is obliged to let reality determine its laws, whereas mathematics is under no such constraint."