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Relativity isn’t needed because rockets never get anywhere near the speeds or gravitational extremes where Einstein’s equations matter. At rocket speeds, Newton
by TMEHpodcast 1y ago
Relativity isn’t needed because rockets never get anywhere near the speeds or gravitational extremes where Einstein’s equations matter. At rocket speeds, Newtonian mechanics is so accurate the difference is negligible, so why make things harder? NASA sticks with Newton because it’s simpler, faster to calculate, and gets the job done perfectly for launching rockets into orbit.
- mattmaroon 1y agoIt was just ELI5-style writing and I was being tongue in cheek about it. Newtonian physics are fine for determining how much propellant will launch a rocket into orbit, but you couldn’t build a GPS satellite without accounting for space time distortion. NASA does a lot of things.
- xandrius 1y agoCouldn't you engineer that away with a bunch of magical numbers? I'm curious.
- mattmaroon 1y agoWell, you can’t get to a GPS using Newtonian physics alone because of gravitational time dilation. The clock in space runs at a different speed than the clock on earth. If they tried, scientists could perhaps have come up with some sort of fudge factor (like what I think they do with dark matter) and made it work, sure. But it would have been really confusing to them when they figured out that all the clocks in space run at a different speed than the same clocks on earth. Relativity plays a big role in astronomy too. One of the big questions in physics in Einstein’s day was why the planets didn’t appear exactly where you expected given Newtonian laws. Becoming spacefaring without general relativity would have been difficult.