CHAPTER VIII
OTHER TESTS OF THE THEORY
We have seen that the swift-moving light-waves possess great advantages as a means of exploring the non-Euclidean property of space. But there is an old fable about the hare and the tortoise. The slow-moving planets have qualities which must not be overlooked. The light-wave traverses the region in a few minutes and makes its report; the planet plods on and on for centuries going over the same ground again and again. Each time it goes round it reveals a little about the space, and the knowledge slowly accumulates.
According to Newton's law a planet moves round the sun in an ellipse, and if there are no other planets disturbing it, the ellipse remains the same for ever. According to Einstein's law the path is very nearly an ellipse, but it does not quite close up; and in the next revolution the path has advanced slightly in the same direction as that in which the planet was moving. The orbit is thus an ellipse which very slowly revolves[1].
The exact prediction of Einstein's law is that in one revolution of the planet the orbit will advance through a fraction of a revolution equal to , where is the speed of the planet and the speed of light. The earth has 1/10,000 of the speed of light; thus in one revolution (one year) the point where the earth is at greatest distance from the sun will move on 3/100,000,000 of a revolution, or 0″.038. We could not detect this difference in a year, but we can let it add up for a century at least. It would then be observable but for one thing the—earth's orbit is very blunt, very nearly circular, and so we cannot tell accurately enough which way it is pointing and how its sharpest apses move. We can choose a planet with higher speed so that the effect is increased, not only because is increased, but because the revolutions take less time; but, what
- ↑ Appendix, Note 9
