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Re: POE summary--long! (but *last* from me)



John et al,
I know this may be getting tedious, but let me summarize my
considerable enlightenment and residual confusion, resulting from these
exchanges:
(then you may go gently into the night :)

Special Relativity (SR) made all Newtonian inertial frames (the "fixed
stars" being one) equivalent. Eg.: the magnetic field which appears to
an observer, when he begins to move relative to a charge, is real and is
accounted for by a real source: the moving charge. As an extension of
this success, the ambition of GR is to include accelerated frames in
this synthesis by constructing a new theory of gravitation, which will
include dynamic gravitational fields when source masses move (in analogy
with the magnetic field of moving charges). Thus the centrifugal and
coriolis force fields observed on earth are the real gravitational
fields of the rotating distant stars as measured from a stationary
earth, no less real than a magnetic field. In this view we do not speak
of fictitious gravitational fields any more than we speak of fictitious
magnetic fields. The POE gave the clue as to how this could be
accomplished.

This is what I have previously referred to as viewpoint #1, the view I
have read into some earlier GR writings (Einstein, Bondi, Gamow and
Reichenbach). I have since learned to appreciate viewpoint #2 (which
IMHO achieves a different ambition), and do see that this is the route
by which GR proceeds calculationaly. But I am confused about the
relation between the two viewpoints (they are said to be equivalent, but
.. .)

I guess I would like to come away with a definitive answer to :
Do GR and the POE allow one to take the above viewpoint #1 literally and
do verifiable calculational physics (notwithstanding conceptual
difficulties)?

Thank you for your patience. It is good to learn, exciting if it is a
struggle! -Bob