[Doctor Stochastic]

One of the things that I admire Newton for was his single minded pursuit of a way to prove that the gravitational attraction of a spherical mass can be approximated very closely by a point source at its center.

It's not really an approximation.

[William Tell]

Doctor Stochastic said: "It's not really an approximation."

Yes, I agree. The calculus yields an exact answer.

I was open to the possibility that some problems in General Relativity might yield a slightly different answer, since GR predicts some things that Newton would not have predicted. But Newton's assumptions were exactly accounted for in his calculations.

Do you know whether GR invalidates Newton's conclusion or can a spherical mass always be represented by a point source?