Re: In an RDBMS, what does "Data" mean?

Try as I might, I cannot find confirmation of your extraordinary assertion that the relativisitc precession of mercury was observable in Tycho's data. I don't think you are right about this.

Keep in mind that the vast majority of mercury's precession is explainable, in classical Newtonian mechanics, by the gravitational attraction of the other planets.

In the timelines I've seen, the observation of 35 arcseconds per century of excess precession of Mercury was attributed to an observation in 1845 by Leverrier. It was further corrected to an excess of 43 arcseconds per century by Newcomb in 1882.
Before Einstein, the excess precession of Mercury was attributed to a hitherto unknown (and, it turns out nonexistent) planet inside the orbit of mercury, to which they gave the name "Vulcan". (Live long and prosper).

But the descriptions of the amount of time for which you need observations of Mercury to obtain these findings are very long. So long that I find it doubtful that Tycho could have observed for long enough for his data to detect the Einsteinian precession.

As far as Newton refining and cross checking his work, and seeking to verify or falsify it down to the last epsilon (so to speak), I find that very easy to believe. In fact, his own assessment of his work is that he felt like a little child, playing with the shells on the seashore, while the vast ocean of truth lay undiscovered before him. And Einstein, when asked to comment on Newton's work, said that his own work would have been impossible without Newton's earlier work.

Those people in this forum who seem to have every human gift except humility might do well to learn from such people as Newton and Einstein. Received on Sun May 16 2004 - 03:34:00 CEST