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Re: [Phys-l] Lagrange points



I wouldn't be too hard on them. It's not at all unreasonable to work in a rotating frame when thinking about things like Lagrange points. Moreover, notice that they didn't even talk about gravitational *forces*. They simply said, "the gravity of the Earth and sun balance out." That's really not all that far from a completely reasonable general relativistic statement.

John Mallinckrodt
Cal Poly Pomona

On Dec 2, 2009, at 6:39 PM, John Clement wrote:

I recently read an article about scientific innovations in the recent Time
magazine while waiting in the optometrists orbit. One innovation was an
infrared observatory which is stationed at a Lagrange point where the
"Earth's gravitational force balances the sun's".

So I checked online and came up with a hit on the Brittanica

http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/524909/satellite-observatory
" the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO; 1995) was maneuvered to the
vicinity of a gravitational balance point (L1, one of the Sun-Earth
Lagrangian points)"

The Wikipedia explains the Lagrangian points correctly!

Where are the scientific proofreaders? The writers would fail the FCI
because they don't seem to know that when the forces balance the object goes
in a straight line and will NOT orbit.

John M. Clement
Houston, TX

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