Not only that, but the relationship is probably 1/R. What significance does that have? I looked into it a few years ago. Here is a short letter I wrote to Physics Today.

Once an effect is shown to be 1/R, all bets are off. The known mass clusters such as the Great Attractor would have a greater effect than the center of the Galaxy, for instance. The effect no longer dims with distance, but may increase--or, almost coincidentally, nearly stays the same.

Yes, Grapes, and as you know most gravitational work is carried out in terms of the gravitational 'potential' which is known to vary as 1/R.

Thanks, for the appropriate (and interesting) letter.

As you brought up, it is worth mentioning that there are several non-metric (Euclidean) theories that appear to duplicate Einstein's GR, Whitehead being one. However, I was unaware of anisotropic gravitational effects.

Secondly, I thought it interesting you would bring up Ken Nordvedt. I missed the article, but I suspect he was trying to show something along the lines that self-energy of the earth's field ought to contribute to the effective mass and be observable thru precision lunar ranging, no?

Nevertheless, apparently he contributed much to the ideas I mentioned previously to Richard Hanak about gravitomagnetic fields.
While most consider these effects to be miniscule, he attempted relativistically to show they were ubiquitous and directly manifest as inertia.

G^2



<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: Gsquare on 2002-09-01 13:34 ]</font>

I have it around here somewhere. I'll dig it up. I actually sent the letter to Physics Today before his article appeared, and they asked me to recast it as a response to his article. I'd already discussed the issue with Clifford Will. Nordvedt did write a short response.