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Experiment This Weekend To Measure Speed Of Gravity

Posted by timothy on from the ch-ch-ch-changes dept.

An anonymous reader writes: "Is gravity an instantaneous phenomenon, as we were taught in high school, or is its speed, like all other Einsteinian phenomena, bounded by the speed of light? A radical new experiment, proposed by Sergei Kopeikin, and involving the Very Long Baseline Array, is set to occur this weekend, and results should be known within about two weeks."

3 of 91 comments (clear)

  1. Re:I thought by unDiWahn · · Score: 2, Insightful

    I'll bet that the current theories won't, and they'll have to invent something new to account for the difference, ala Tachyons or Dark Matter

  2. Re:gravity doesn't exist, per se by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

    Where from? A flow of gravitons? Who knows.

    I wonder if the speed of magnetic effects can be measure more easily that gravity.

  3. Er, what does "speed" mean? by pla · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Perhaps I've missed something, but didn't Bell's theorem, with the help of Clauser and Freedman's experimental work, demonstrate that the entire concept of "locality" fails?

    In which case, the idea of a cosmic speed limit fails as well, since we measure velocities in terms of displacement per unit of time. Without the idea of locality, the first of those units ceases to exist, and the second comes under some serious suspicion...