Newtonian gravity into spacetime distortion

[dstebbins]

Why would Einstein replace the Newtonian explanation of gravity, which was relatively understandable, with a complex theory of spacetime distortion? What's the point? The end results are the same regardless of which theory you choose, so why bother? What phenomina exist that would motivate such a radical change? There has to be a phenominon that Newtonian gravity doesn't explain that Einsteinian gravity does, otherwise he wouldn't have bothered to make the theory because Newtonian gravity would have been sufficient.

[Fuzzwood]

The same reason why we have 100+ elements and not 4

[dstebbins]

The same reason why we have 100+ elements and not 4

 

What?

[tomgwyther]

There are lots of mesurable effects that Einstein's veiw of gravity shows.

 

I wonder if if might be a good idea for people to read Einsteins work fully, before posting questions to this site.

[dstebbins]

I wonder if it might be a good idea for you to not be such a total asshole, acting like you're better than everyone else.

[swansont]

I wonder if it might be a good idea for you to not be such a total asshole, acting like you're better than everyone else.

 

Didn't we go through an episode of this about two months ago, where it was suggested that it's a bad idea to insult people just because they didn't bend over backwards to answer your question, or you just didn't understand it? I thought you were banned for a few days as a result. Pity the lesson didn't stick. Grow up already.

 

I'm confident you can look up general relativity on wikipedia and find that GR predicted/explained the precession of Mercury, bending of starlight, gravitational time dilation and redshift, and more, that are not part of Newtonian gravity.

 

Asking about simple factual things like this, that can easily be looked up, give the appearance that you are just too lazy to do the work yourself.

[someguy]

well for one thing newtonian gravity can't be used to calculate how gravity bends light since light has no mass and therefore by newtonian logic is not affected by gravity. so for any calculations that have the locations of stars or something you need to use the einsteinian way.

if you are allowed to be imprecise enough for what you want to do you could use the newtonian method if you want. but if you need to be more precise or you need to account for light then you need to use the einsteinian way. it looks like a win win situation to me. Personally i find that any formula that uses a constant is a little suspect, it looks kind of like a quick fix job to me for some reason.