Starship Asterisk*

In a science article the Earth's Lagrange points were discussed. I quote the article - "the five orbital positions where objects can be stationary relative to the Earth and the Sun." I presume that stationary relative to the Sun means orbital distance only. What theory or equation(s) explains the number to be five points and not more or not less ?

dougettinger wrote:In a science article the Earth's Lagrange points were discussed. I quote the article - "the five orbital positions where objects can be stationary relative to the Earth and the Sun." I presume that stationary relative to the Sun means orbital distance only. What theory or equation(s) explains the number to be five points and not more or not less ?

Good Wikipedia article.

You are absolutely right. I am more and more amazed at all the current information that can be found in Wikipedia. Who feeds this excellent information to the free encyclopedia?

Doug Ettinger

dougettinger wrote:You are absolutely right. I am more and more amazed at all the current information that can be found in Wikipedia. Who feeds this excellent information to the free encyclopedia?

The information comes from anybody able and willing to contribute. I keep an eye on a handful of Wikipedia articles, and edit them as necessary. I find the science articles to be of generally high quality. That's probably because the only contributors are those who know something, and those who have such outlandish ideas (like the electric universe folks) that their edits are trivially removed. This is different from articles about people, politics, or history (for example), where the range of ideas is much broader, and therefore reading these articles requires a much more critical approach.

Please refer me to Wikipedia for some of your answers when it makes sense. I do not want to waste your valuable time when I can easily find it in Wikipedia.

Doug Ettinger

You might also want to check Scholarpedia, which runs on the same wikimedia software as Wikipedia, but is, as they say, "the peer-reviewed open-access encyclopedia written by scholars from all around the world."

I don't have the knowledge to judge the quality there, but from the names of the contributors I suppose it must be of a very high caliber. I'd appreciate hearing what others think of it.

Rob