Explanation of the Empirical Terms of motion of the Moon
by Assuming Gravitational Extinction in the Earth's Interior by C. F. Bottlinger.
(Translated from German, 1912, Astronomische Nachrichten). (33K)

On George-Louis Le Sage's theory of gravity: Except for the early theories of Newton, the modern theories of gravity involve action-at-a-distance, meaning there is no physical mechanism for communicating gravity between two bodies. Le Sage offered a pressure theory, akin to Newton's first theory, for gravity. Some works never before translated are presented here, as well as modern applications of the theory.

The Propagation of Gravity in Space and Time by Paul Gerber. (9MB)
Translated from Zeitschift fur Mathmatik und Physik, 43:93-104, 1898. Gerber uses an advanced potential to explain gravity and finds it gives the speed of light and the perihelion precessions of the planets at least as well as Einstein's General theory of Relativity did 19 years later. Gerber's work is brilliant but was suppressed because he was of the old pragmatic school of physics and not of the emerging theory-only group characterized by Minkowski and Einstein. Because Gerber was not Jewish, the Nazi party ranked him above the Jewish theoretical physicists and promoted his works even though Gerber was not a Nazi and died before there was such a thing in Germany.

The Influence of the Self-rotation of Central Bodies on the Movements of the Planets and the Moon According to Einstein's Theory of Gravitation by J. Lense and H. Thirring. (9MB)
Translated from Physicalische Zeitschrift, 19:156-163, 1918. This is the paper that gave us the Lense-Thirring effect that recently-launched Gravity Probe B satellite, and several earlier satellites hope to find. Lense and Thirring looked at what happens gravitationally inside a rotating shell of matter. This is a thinly-disguised paper geocentric paper showing that the geocentric model gives exactly the same result as the heliocentric plus a dragging effect, reportedly now observed (2005), but not expected from the purely heliocentric model.

The Effect of Rotating Distant Masses in Einstein's Theory of Gravitation by Hans Thirring. (9MB)
Translated from Physicalische Zeitschrift, 19:33-39, 1918. Thirring looks at the gravitational behavior of an object located at the center of a rotating disk of matter. This paper led to the Lense-Thirring paper.