From: Eliezer S. Yudkowsky (sentience@pobox.com)
Date: Mon Jun 09 2003 - 23:14:58 MDT
Randall Randall wrote:
>
> So since two orbiting stars are continually being "bumped" by each
> other, your explanation seems to imply that each star is orbiting
> around a location which trails the actual star.
No. Each star, at time t, is attracted toward the location where the
other star would have been, at time t, had it not been accelerated. (I
think. IANAP.)
> As long as orbits
> work anyway, this is fine, but wasn't the Flandern (sp?) fellow
> saying that in this event orbits couldn't be stable?
Actually, it turns out to be *exactly* what is needed for orbits to be
almost but not completely stable, due to radiating away energy as
gravitational waves (as confirmed by observation of, e.g., neutron stars
and so on). Nobody has been able to explain to Flandern that this is the
theoretical prediction of the current theory, nor that it has been
experimentally confirmed. This is what makes Flandern a crackpot.
-- Eliezer S. Yudkowsky http://singinst.org/ Research Fellow, Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence
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