Abstract
A? answer to this question in the negative has “been advanced in a previous paper on the gravitational deflection of light {Phil. Mag., Jan.). The destructive paradoxes concerned with the recent gravitation theory, which were unfolded by M. Jean Le Roux, professor at Rennes, in three notes in the Comptes rendus (Nov. 6, Dec. 4 and 22), after that paper was completed, were referred to in a footnote in support of this departure from the familiar answer. These objections require to be further considered; for at first sight they are destructive to all such theories, including the modification there substituted. If an orbit is postulated to be a curve of minimal length in a fourfold expanse of space-time, the element of length (or distance-interval) must be expressed for it locally, and can involve as variables only its own co-ordinates and their differentials. Yet in the cases that have been worked out, the element as determined involves also the concurrent coordinates of the other interacting masses; withall these variables present, it could not belong to a curve in a fourfold at all. This destructive dilemma applies very widely.
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LARMOR, J. Can Gravitation Really be absorbed into the Frame of Space and Time?. Nature 111, 200 (1923). https://doi.org/10.1038/111200a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/111200a0