The Motion of Mercury's Perihelion (ICR Technical Monograph, No. 11)
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| Author | Harold S Slusher, Francisco S Ramirez |
|---|---|
| Series | ICR Technical Monograph, No. 11 |
| Published | 1984 |
| Publisher | Institute for Creation Research |
| Pages | 101 |
| ISBN | 093276617X |
The Motion of Mercury's Perihelion: A Reevaluation of the Problem and its Implications for Cosmology and Cosmogony is a 1984 monograph by Harold S Slusher and Francisco S Ramirez, issued as number 11 in the Institute for Creation Research's Technical Monograph series.
Its subject is the classic anomaly in celestial mechanics: the perihelion of Mercury advances by about 43 arcseconds per century more than Newtonian gravitation predicts once the perturbations of the other planets are accounted for. That residue is the first and best known confirmation claimed for general relativity, and Slusher and Ramirez set out to show that it does not require general relativity to explain it. The subtitle indicates how far they take the argument: if the classic test of relativity can be met by other means, the cosmology and cosmogony erected on relativity are open to reconsideration.
Background: the anomaly
The problem is genuine and long-standing. Le Verrier established in 1859 that Mercury's perihelion advances faster than Newtonian theory allows, and the unexplained residue — about 43 arcseconds per century — resisted every classical remedy tried on it, including the hypothetical intra-Mercurial planet Vulcan. Einstein's 1915 calculation, which recovered the figure from general relativity without adjustable parameters, is generally regarded as the theory's first and cleanest empirical success.
Anyone proposing to remove general relativity from the account must therefore supply the 43 arcseconds from somewhere else. This is what the monograph attempts.
The argument
Slusher and Ramirez re-examine the derivation of the residual advance and argue that the standard treatment does not establish what is claimed for it, and that the observed motion can be accounted for without invoking relativistic spacetime curvature. The companion paper "Secular Variations of the Orbital Motions of Mercury's Perihelion: A Reevaluation of the Problem and Its Implictions for Cosmology and Cosmogony" (1984), also by both authors, presents the same material in shorter form.
The programme did not stop with the monograph. Ramirez returned to it at the first International Conference on Creationism in 1986 with a paper explicitly claiming to explain the precession of Mercury's perihelion without the need for general relativity.
The wider conclusion the authors draw — the "implications for cosmology and cosmogony" of the title — is that the standard relativistic cosmology, and with it the standard account of the origin and age of the solar system, loses one of its principal supports. This connects the monograph to Slusher's other work, in particular his argument for a relatively small Riemannian rather than Euclidean universe, and to his broader criticism of relativity in "The Dingle Problem, Cosmology, and the Postulate of Relativity" (1985).
Context
The monograph belongs to a specific publishing programme rather than to the general dissident literature. The ICR Technical Monographs were the Institute for Creation Research's technical series, and Slusher wrote several of them through the 1970s and 1980s, including Age of the Cosmos, Origin of the Universe and The Age of the Solar System. Slusher was an assistant professor of physics at the University of Texas at El Paso and was described by the science writer Kendrick Frazier in 1986 as perhaps the most outspoken critic of conventional science among the creationists.
Readers should note that the monograph's motivation is avowedly not neutral: the objection to general relativity is pursued because of what the authors take to follow from it for cosmogony. That does not settle whether the celestial-mechanical argument succeeds, which is a separate question, but it is part of the record.
Note on the title
The page title has been shortened to match the other ICR Technical Monograph entries on this wiki. The full title as published is given in the infobox above. The wiki previously rendered the subtitle as "A Reevalution"; the published spelling is "A Reevaluation".
Links to Purchase Book
- Motion of Mercury's Perihelion at Amazon (ISBN 0-932766-17-X)