Re: The Shapiro's experiment HOAX. A 1968 TIME article.

On Sat, 26 Oct 2024 4:19:14 +0000, rhertz wrote:

If you analyze the timeline between 1800 and 1913, you could appreciate
the passage of gravity with infinite speed to gravity limited to c
speed. And, in this case, the absolute pioneer was Gerber (1898) with
his paper explaining Mercury's perihelion advance if gravity moves at c
speed.

Mercury's Perihelion From Le Verrier To Einstein, by N. T. Roseveare,
is available from the Internet Archive. Based on his doctoral thesis,
this 1982 book provides a thorough analysis of the many proposals
that had been set forth to explain Mercury's anomalous precession.
There are two very serious issues with Gerber's prediction.
1) It did not take into account the variation of mass with velocity.
   At around the turn of the century, there were several competing
   theories seeking to explain this EMPIRICALLY OBSERVED phenomenon
   first noted by Thomson in 1893 and carefully characterized in
   subsequent experiments by Kaufmann, by Bucherer, Hubka, Neumann,
   Guye etc. https://tinyurl.com/4munb3ua
   The variation of mass with velocity adds an additional 7" advance
   in the perihelion of Mercury, so that Gerber's theory would predict
   an incorrect overall anomalous advance of 49".
2) Gerber's gravitation theory provides an incorrect prediction for
   the gravitational deflection of light by the Sun, 3/2 the value
   given by general relativity. Now, in the years subsequent to the
   Eddington expedition, various other eclipse measurements gave
   rather widely variant results, some of which would have favored
   Gerber. However, present-day measurements using methods of far
   greater precision have consistently validated the GR prediction.