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Mar. 21st, 2007 07:28 pmHi! I feel kind of sucky this week.
This post is specially for![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
moosehead_beer, since a lot of my other posts haven't made very much sense but he is still reading. In 424 recently we got some general relativity, and we derived the metric for the case of a stationary, non-rotating point mass where space becomes flat at ∞. We skipped over a very important part, the computation of the Ricci tensor, because it's really really long.
That metric is called the Schwartzchild metric (it has a singularity at the "Schwartzchild radius"). We then found out what the geodesics (in particular the orbits of the planets) look like; it turns out that the DE looks almost like the DE for an ellipse, and so we regarded it as a perturbation (or something; I think what we did was suspicious.)
Unfortunately, we were unable to solve the differential equation exactly. Or were we?
( What do the orbits of the planets look like for this special case? )
This post is specially for
moosehead_beer, since a lot of my other posts haven't made very much sense but he is still reading. In 424 recently we got some general relativity, and we derived the metric for the case of a stationary, non-rotating point mass where space becomes flat at ∞. We skipped over a very important part, the computation of the Ricci tensor, because it's really really long.That metric is called the Schwartzchild metric (it has a singularity at the "Schwartzchild radius"). We then found out what the geodesics (in particular the orbits of the planets) look like; it turns out that the DE looks almost like the DE for an ellipse, and so we regarded it as a perturbation (or something; I think what we did was suspicious.)
Unfortunately, we were unable to solve the differential equation exactly. Or were we?
( What do the orbits of the planets look like for this special case? )
