Science Buddies: "Ask an Expert"

I'm thinking of doing a science fair project on the theory of general relativity and how it dictates the planetary orbits, specifically mercury, however I am not sure how I would be able to show this properly with limited, inexpensive materials...Does anybody have any ideas?

Welcome to the forum. I have been unable to come up with any practical ideas for projects in the area of General Relativity. The observation of the GR effects on the orbit of Mercury is very difficult and time consuming as well as requiring "big science" equipment. These effects are much more conspicuous when determining the orbits of binary pulsars, but I do not think it likely that you could detect the signal from one of the known binary pulsars with anything less than a substantially sized radio telescope, much less perform the required precise time measurements.

I did stumble across a site that lists a number of science fair projects in the relativity area, its URL is

http://www.juliantrubin.com/fairproject ... ivity.html

You might find some ideas from these previous projects, although the first few of projects I looked at were either time consuming or involved physics that was over my head, e.g. string theory.

If you have not already done so, give our Project Selection Wizard a try to find some projects that might appeal to you. It can be found here:

https://www.sciencebuddies.org/science- ... gister.php

Best of luck finding a topic.