Abstract

A better solution the the precession of Mercury's perihelion

Author(s): Jorma Jormakka

The article shows that the explanation that Einstein gave to the precession of the perihelion of Mercury is incorrect: the dynamic equations he used do not even accelerate a falling stone, they cannot be used as an improvement of Newtonian mechanics. Then the article derives a formula for the precession speed and shows why most of the precession of Mercury can be explained by gravitational forces from other planets. But these forces change in time, the last section calculates a long time average of the effect of Jupiter on Mercuryâ??s precession speed. This effect is about one hundred times smaller than the relatively short term effect that has been measured. This means that actually Mercuryâ??s long term precession is much smaller than it seems to us based on our relatively short time series when the precession has been measured. This long term precession effect is quite on the range of the unexplained small part of Mercuryâ??s precession and it might be a mechanism that has not been considered. The last section shows a serious error in the relativistic calculation of the precession speed of Mercury.