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What is the Speed of Gravity?

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41–50 of 122 posts

Re: What is the Speed of Gravity?

#41
post #16

This is all well and good, but what the article is talking about is the speed of the propagation of gravity waves. I've never heard anyone who wasn't a crank argue that gravity waves travel at anything other than the speed of light. As the article confirms, observation of pulsars has confirmed the speed of gravity waves to very close to the speed of light. However, I think the larger objection goes something like thi…

Yes, in some sense gravitational attraction carries information about the location of the object.

Yes, Information may not escape the event horizon of a black hole, because to do so would require it to travel faster than the speed of light (up to small quantum corrections)

No, it doesn't follow that information about the singularity is getting out of the black hole. The information got out, and stayed out. The horizon prevents updates from getting out, leaving the previous information and attraction "frozen in" to the shape of space-time.

Re: What is the Speed of Gravity?

#42
The Sun, as it is right now, won't have its gravity affect Earth for another 8+ minutes, and the gravity that the Earth feels right now pulling it towards the Sun is actually pulling it towards where the Sun was 8+ minutes ago! (Weird, isn't it?)

I'm almost positive this statement is incorrect.

Relativistic force laws tend to be forced to contain correction factors that ensure that constant velocity motion is "predicted" and the direction of the force is adjusted accordingly - as long as a body is not accelerating, a purely attractive or repulsive force will be pointing at its current position, not its position 8 mins ago.

To see why this must be the case for a repulsive force, at least, imagine two charges riding on frictionless rails that keep them at a constant, finite distance. Suppose they're both moving with some constant velocity (to start, at least) in the same direction - now the place that the force from the other charge appears to be coming from is behind the charge, so if there was no correction factor, each charge would be getting an extra push forwards. This would lead to a runaway "bootstrap" acceleration, and the particles would accelerate to the speed of light. That's a pretty clear violation of the conservation laws, so...

With attractive forces like gravity, there's still a conservation problem, since the charges would slow down to zero speed eventually, but it's always more convincing to cite the runaway solution as a violation of conservation laws than the run-down one, because while the energy could possibly leak out of the charges into the fields, there's nowhere to pull infinite energy from, so it's pretty clear there's a problem if we'd need to.

And this is somewhat different from the runaway self-action solutions that we grudgingly "accept" in E+M, because those tend to involve some limit to infinitesimal size, whereas this is a completely finite situation that we could theoretically set up in the real world with a couple of charged beads or something like that.

Re: What is the Speed of Gravity?

#43
post #16

This is all well and good, but what the article is talking about is the speed of the propagation of gravity waves. I've never heard anyone who wasn't a crank argue that gravity waves travel at anything other than the speed of light. As the article confirms, observation of pulsars has confirmed the speed of gravity waves to very close to the speed of light. However, I think the larger objection goes something like thi…

You don't have to go 'faster than the speed of light' to escape a black hole if you're not affected in the usual manner by gravity. And I'm not aware of any suggestion that gravity itself is affected by gravity.

Gravity absolutely is affected by gravity. The Einstein field equations are non-linear, so gravitational energy is itself a source of gravity. All forms of energy, and momentum, and even stress and pressure are combined into the "stress energy tensor" which determines the local curvature of space-time.

Re: What is the Speed of Gravity?

#44

The Sun, as it is right now, won't have its gravity affect Earth for another 8+ minutes, and the gravity that the Earth feels right now pulling it towards the Sun is actually pulling it towards where the Sun was 8+ minutes ago! (Weird, isn't it?) I'm almost positive this statement is incorrect. Relativistic force laws tend to be forced to contain correction factors that ensure that constant velocity motion is "predic…

> Relativistic force laws tend to be forced to contain correction factors that ensure that constant velocity motion is "predicted" and the direction of the force is adjusted accordingly - as long as a body is not accelerating, a purely attractive or repulsive force will be pointing at its current position, not its position 8 mins ago.

Absolutely correct for E&M. This is because it's a vector field, and the velocity of the source is encoded in how the field moves.

For gravity, it goes one better -- this is a tensor field (hence the notion of gravitons having to be "spin-2" if they were described by a quantum theory), and the acceleration is encoded as well, so you need a non-constant acceleration to notice any difference from the position being instantaneously updated.

Re: What is the Speed of Gravity?

#45
post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Something that puzzles me about "the speed of light in X" discussions is exactly the confusion over whether the speed of light is "different" in a medium. On the one hand, it seems like it isn't, since no actual photons are moving more slowly. On the other, things like Cherenkov radiation seem to indicate that the apparent speed of light matters for things that you'd expect to be based on the constant speed of light…

But AFAIK Cherenkov radiation occurs in medium, so there isn't any contradiction to the generally accepted limits, and Ronald Mallet is highly unlikely to be trusted, see the wikipedia entry: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ronald_Mallett

I was under the impression that tachyons (should they exist) would be expected to give off Cherenkov radiation in vacuum, but I'm not sure where I got that impression.

I hadn't actually heard anything about Mallett for a few years, and I guess this is why. :)

Re: What is the Speed of Gravity?

#46
post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the speed of gravity was the speed of light, then heavy objects passing near the earth would have more gravity than objects passing away. This is a problem because...?

problem because if you had a stable highly elliptical orbit of two bodies, the attraction would be greater during the approaching phase than the departure phase. The equation would not be balanced. Elliptical orbits would degrade due to the pulling being greater on arrival than departure. This is not the case. Maybe it is only a problem as you approach light speed.

I believe the submitted article gives an example where orbits degrade in just the way you describe.

Re: What is the Speed of Gravity?

#47
post #12

Reminds me of a thought experiment that's always bugged me: if you had an incredibly long see-saw or lever, like the length of the galaxy, would movement at one end instantaneously be matched by movement at the other end? (I think the reason it bugs me is because the object itself is preposterous, but I still want to know)

I think it would snap. It would take a tremendous amount of force to move it and no material could withstand that force.

It would bend or stretch before it snapped. Nearly all, if not absolutely all, materials that you might want to build a see-saw from will deform before they snap. Maybe it won't deform much, but that ok, and is enough to transmit a push from one end of the lever to the other.

Remember, a lever is just a collection of individual atoms linked together by elecromagnetic forces. You push of the atoms on one end, and they are going electromagnetically push on nearby atoms, and that push is going to propagate as a wave at around the speed of light.

Re: What is the Speed of Gravity?

#48
post #44

The Sun, as it is right now, won't have its gravity affect Earth for another 8+ minutes, and the gravity that the Earth feels right now pulling it towards the Sun is actually pulling it towards where the Sun was 8+ minutes ago! (Weird, isn't it?) I'm almost positive this statement is incorrect. Relativistic force laws tend to be forced to contain correction factors that ensure that constant velocity motion is "predic…

> Relativistic force laws tend to be forced to contain correction factors that ensure that constant velocity motion is "predicted" and the direction of the force is adjusted accordingly - as long as a body is not accelerating, a purely attractive or repulsive force will be pointing at its current position, not its position 8 mins ago. Absolutely correct for E&M. This is because it's a vector field, and the velocity o…

> For gravity, it goes one better -- this is a tensor field (hence the notion of gravitons having to be "spin-2" if they were described by a quantum theory), and the acceleration is encoded as well, ....

Well, that's mind blowing. Where could I go to learn more about this?

Re: What is the Speed of Gravity?

#49
post #27
post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it were a physical object (say, a long steel bar), the atoms would communicate at the speed of light, so your object would bend or squish, with a wave travelling along it. Now, let's say you move an ideal laser across an ideal screen some distance away. The further the screen is, the faster the laser dot will move. At some point the dot will move faster than c... But the dot is not an object. If you think in terms…

>Now, let's say you move an ideal laser across an ideal screen some distance away. The further the screen is, the faster the laser dot will move. At some point the dot will move faster than c... I'm pretty confident that you're wrong about this, but I don't really understand the scenario you're describing. Could you clarify? edit: I eat my words and stand corrected.

For fun: the moon has a radius of about 1730 km. At full moon we can see about half of the moon, so the distance from one side to the other is about pi * 1730 km. So how fast do you need to move a laser pointer across the moon surface to make the dot attain the speed of light?

http://www.google.com/search?q=%28%281730000+*+pi%29+m%29+%2...

A bit less than 2/100 of a second. That seems quite feasible really!

(of course the moon is not a flat screen, but hey, back of the envelope and all that).

Re: What is the Speed of Gravity?

#50

The Sun, as it is right now, won't have its gravity affect Earth for another 8+ minutes, and the gravity that the Earth feels right now pulling it towards the Sun is actually pulling it towards where the Sun was 8+ minutes ago! (Weird, isn't it?) I'm almost positive this statement is incorrect. Relativistic force laws tend to be forced to contain correction factors that ensure that constant velocity motion is "predic…

Yes, you are correct. The easiest way to think about it is that while the gravity from the earth moves at the speed of light, while it travels toward the sun, it also moves at the same original speed the earth was traveling at.

Te end result is that it appears to travel instantaneously since it ends up at the same place. But this only works for constant velocities - if the earth changes direction suddenly this "correction" will not be correct, since it will still "assume" the earth is still headed in the direction it was heading before.

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