Slashdot Mirror
Speed of Gravity Experiment Challenged
An anonymous reader writes "The previous hoopla over the discovery of the speed of gravity has an opponent from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Read about the latest calculations."
← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)
What do you suppose the repurcussions would be if it could be shown that gravity was instantaneous, rather than propagating at the speed of light? Could we use that to transmit information instantaneously? Would that violate causality?
the question could be more fundamental. Does gravity have a speed? Consider this: light is a particle (wave) traveling along a many dimensional space-time membrane. Now, we've defined (more or less) what a photon is; and, how it behaves. We expect it to travel no faster than c. The problem is, we don't really undertand the space-time thing.
We have some theories as to how space is constructed. One of the things physics is trying to do is to create a theory that ties together space, time, gravity, energy, mass, quantum mechanics (basically everything). It's proving to be very difficult and gravity is the problem. Would a gravity wave have to obey all of the "laws of physics" as we know them? maybe not. Not if our theories are wrong. A lack of understanding wrt gravity might be why we need to make claims about "dark matter" and "dark energy" in order to explain the accelerating universe.
You have to remember that our "laws" are based on observation. The rules (like no speed exceeds c) are based on mathematical models created to explain the observations. What if the models are close, but wrong?
Just something to think about.