Re: Retrograde Motion - Virtual Particles

[Jim Green <Jim.Green@Snow.edu>]

David, et al., thank you for your review of planetary retrograde motion.
(and for the Gauge particle stuff which I am still mulling.)

I am in intellectual agreement with what you say about the planets, but
somehow I have a mental block visualizing the action.  Maybe I will unblock
tonight at something like 3am -- sitting bolt upright with some sort of
epiphany:

Here is the problem:  I see that as my fast car passes a slower car on the
interstate, the slower car seems to reverse direction just as I pass.  BUT
that car never seems to reverse again to go forward.

But Mars, etc *do*  -- somebody help me out here!!!!   Please!

Maybe Tycho was right.

Jim Green



At 11:11 PM 6/25/96 -0400, you wrote:
> Retrograde Motion
>
> All the planets (other than Earth) exhibit retrograde motion during a portion
> of their synodic period.  The superior planets (those orbiting the Sun outside
> the Earth's orbit) display retrograde motion near opposition when the Earth
> passes between them and the Sun.  The inferior planets (those orbiting the
> Sun inside the Earth's orbit) display retrograde motion near inferior
> conjunction when they pass between the Sun and the Earth.  (This motion is
> difficult to see as one has to look into the glare of the Sun when looking at
> an inferior planet whose phase goes from waning crescent to new to waxing
> crescent as the planet passes from being an evening star to being a morning
> star.)
>
> th a
> group velocity slower than c for the massive gauge boson case.  It is the
> nonzero mass of the Weak gauge bosons which gives the Weak interaction its
> very short range of operation.  The other interactions have an "infinite"
> range of operation (1/r^2 force counts as infinite here).  The Strong force
> is only noticed strongly inside hadrons and slightly in nuclei (but strong
> enough to bind the nucleons into the nucleus) not because it is a short ranged
> force, but because its potential energy *grows* with distance and this causes
> confinement of its sources (colored quarks) into color-neutral particles (such
> as the mesons and the baryons) and the strong interaction between these color-
> neutral composite particles does fall off rapidly with distance.
>
> David Bowman
> Georgetown College
> dbowman@gtc.georgetown.ky.us