Retarded gravity can be obtained from the weak field approximation to general relativity [
5]. The metric perturbation
can be given in term of a retarded potential
as follows [
5,
12]:
In the above
G is the gravitational universal constant,
is where the potential is measured,
is the location of the mass element generating the potential,
, and
is the mass density. The duration
for galaxies may be a few tens of thousands of years, but can be considered short in comparison to the time taken for the galactic density to change significantly. Similarly for clusters of galaxies the duration
for galaxies may be a few tens of millions of years, but can be considered short in comparison to the time taken for the galactic cluster density to change significantly. Thus, we can write a Taylor series for the density:
By inserting Equations (
2) into Equation (
1) and keeping the first three terms, we will obtain:
The Newtonian potential is the first term:
the second term does not contribute to the force affecting subluminal particles as its gradient is null and the third term is the lower order correction to the Newtonian potential:
The geodesic equation for a any "slow" test particle moving under the above space-time metric can be approximated [
5] using the force per unit mass as follows:
The total force per unit mass is thus:
Now consider a point particle which has a mass
and is located at
, such a particle will have a mass density of:
in which
is a three dimensional Dirac delta function. This particle will cause a Newtonian potential:
and a retardation potential of the form:
Thus any point particle moving at the vicinity of particle
j will be affected by the following force per unit mass:
Now consider a point particle of mass
which is located at
, this particle will feel the force:
We notice once again (see [
6]) that while Newtonian forces are prominent at "short" distances the retardation forces are the most significant at large distances in which it drops as
and this fact is not related to the Taylor series approximation that we have used here. Now let us consider the gravitational effect of particle
k on particle
j, this is easily calculated by exchanging the indices
j and
k in the above expression. As
but
it follows that the Newtonian force satisfies Newton’s third law:
, however, since there is no simple relation between the velocity and acceleration of the particle
j and
k it follows that generally speaking
and thus both the retardation force and the total gravitational force do not satisfy Newton’s third law. This is well known in electromagnetism and discussed in a series of papers [
21,
22,
23,
24,
25,
26].