Originally Posted by
Airbubba
Einstein said that? Who knew? I always thought it was Fig Newton...
Well, they both did. You have Newtonian gravity, and you have Einsteinian gravity. In most cases the equations yeld practically identical results, however, when the values are extreme, as in an object in close orbit around another extremely dense object, like a white dwarf, a neutron star or a black hole, the equations yeld completely different answers.
Here on earth we need to resort to Einsteinian gravity and his theory of relativity in order to get the gps system to work, among other things. If we didnt apply Einsteins equations to the gps system we would see the position of a non moving gps receiver on the surface of the earth drift a couple km each hour. This is due to the fact that the time, and hence the clocks, on the gps satelites is running ever so slightly faster than the time and clocks on earth.