The speed of gravity is instant

[DarwinX]

Darwin, The world of quantum mechanics is attempting to deal with things that from our point of view are smaller than humanly visable.

The effects though of QM are probably necessary to build galaxies and probably universes especially using the Big Bang theories.

Quantum mechanics is just a theory, which is lacking in evidence, even more so, than what the big bang theory is. Logic dictates that the universe must be infinite both outwards and inwards, sheerly because there is nothing to stop it from being so. Note - Only illogical university professors are defending the big bang theory and a limited universe because of its religious implications.

-- Updated June 11th, 2014, 11:09 am to add the following --

According to my understanding. The amount of space inside an atom is equal to the amount of space outside an atom. The only difference is one of fractal dimension reality.

[Mechsmith]

OK< Waves are convienient metaphors. They are used to describe things that cannot be seen. We could call the distance between emitter and illuminated a string of quanta packets but prettynear everybody knows what a wave is and how they act in our particular corner of this universe.

Consider what would happen if gravity was two billion times "c". I don't think that you can make it work that way. I am going to think a bit and then try to calculate "c" with that influence.

For instance what would be the speeds of particles, anything from quarks to meteors, subjected to that for some time.

What would their speeds be if subject to infinite speed but measureable force

What would their speeds be if subject to measureable force but a limit of "c"

Can we build a galaxy or a universe with one of these

[Hog Rider]

I'm getting puzzled why there is a spat of meaningless threads emerging. Juxtapositions of concepts which do not belong.

You might as well talk about the sound of red, or the colour of darkness. "Does time Move?" Has been one such question. And here is another."The speed of Gravity is instant". Here's anon other. "What is the acceleration of a distance?"; or " How much does density weight?"

Gravity is not a concept that has any speed, and so too time is the ground of the possibility to understand movement, but does not move itself.

[Xris]

I'm getting puzzled why there is a spat of meaningless threads emerging. Juxtapositions of concepts which do not belong.

You might as well talk about the sound of red, or the colour of darkness. "Does time Move?" Has been one such question. And here is another."The speed of Gravity is instant". Here's anon other. "What is the acceleration of a distance?"; or " How much does density weight?"

Gravity is not a concept that has any speed, and so too time is the ground of the possibility to understand movement, but does not move itself.

I am inclined to agree but science using terms like waves or particles to explain gravity gives the impression it has speed. If the sun instantly disappeared how long would it take for the Earth to feel the effect?

[Hog Rider]

I'm getting puzzled why there is a spat of meaningless threads emerging. Juxtapositions of concepts which do not belong.

You might as well talk about the sound of red, or the colour of darkness. "Does time Move?" Has been one such question. And here is another."The speed of Gravity is instant". Here's anon other. "What is the acceleration of a distance?"; or " How much does density weight?"

Gravity is not a concept that has any speed, and so too time is the ground of the possibility to understand movement, but does not move itself.

I am inclined to agree but science using terms like waves or particles to explain gravity gives the impression it has speed. If the sun instantly disappeared how long would it take for the Earth to feel the effect?

It's a good question, but it seems to be in the nature of things that they do not just disappear. (thankfully)

But let's say the effect is "instant", that does not imply speed per se. It implies that the Universe is a continuum; or has a contiguous fabric.

What's the view from science on this? I thought the idea was that everything in the universe applies a granitic force on every other thing in the universe, as if it were all trying to reassemble after the Big Bang. But since the Universe is expanding then doesn't gravity have to have a negative speed?

[Xris]

Hog rider, I do not see gravity as travelling but as I said, if science claims waves or particles, the idea of travelling has to be considered. Waves create movement and science most certainly insists on them. The only viable alternative has to be tension between objects of mass. This tension is explained very convincingly using Bill Gaedes ropes.

[Steve3007]

I've only just got around to reading the OP of this topic and it's very interesting. I wish I'd read it earlier. The part about Gaede's rope theory seems to be what has most exercised the contributors after the initial post. But the original quote from Eddington, pointing out that the finite speed of the propagation of the gravitational force would result in a couple, or torque, in the interaction of two gravitating bodies is interesting and, I think, deserves thinking about. I may have missed it, but I don't see anywhere where anyone in the subsequent posts has done so.

A "couple", of course, means two forces acting on different points in a physical system and pointing in different directions, resulting in angular acceleration. So, in a classical Newtonian consideration of gravity it's correct to say that, in order for conservation of momentum to work, gravity has to be assumed to propagate instantly. Of course the same is true in electromagnetism because the electromagnetic force doesn't propagate instantly. But, in the case of gravity, the equations of General Relativity ensure that the gravitational force of the Sun on Jupiter points towards the point where the sun will be.

---

Going back to the subjects onto which the posts drifted after the OP. I think this, from, Xris is interesting to examine:

It's like dropping a thousand pebbles in pond and expecting to get a clear image of each stone from the resulting complex wave formation. This is not even asking how a wave can be transmited without a medium or if a medium exists why we have not found it.

If you wanted to, you could in fact, with a bit of trouble, do that experiment and demonstrate that you can indeed get a clear "image" of each stone. Your best bet would be to make a water-wave equivalent of a pinhole camera.

As you said, there are so many waves travelling around in so many directions at the same time that if you simply consider those waves as they are, you won't get any image at all. That's why when you hold up a white sheet of paper to your window you don't get an image of the world outside on the paper. You get uniform whiteness - lots of light from all over the scene outside simultaneously hitting every point on the paper. To get an image, you need to filter out almost all of those light waves. That's what a pinhole camera does. Place the piece of paper in a light-proof box with a small hole in the end and you do get an image. Because you create a single one-to-one path between each point in the scene and each point on the paper.

Do a similar thing in your pond, ensuring that the size of the hole is comfortably bigger than the wavelength, and you'd get clear "water wave rays" corresponding to each pebble.

[enegue]

Gravity can't have speed because speed implies motion. Gravity doesn't move from one location to another, but CAUSES bodies to move from one location to another. This is true regardless of whether you adhere to the ideas of gravitons or EM ropes or curved space.

Cheers,
enegue

[DarwinX]

Gravity can't have speed because speed implies motion. Gravity doesn't move from one location to another, but CAUSES bodies to move from one location to another. This is true regardless of whether you adhere to the ideas of gravitons or EM ropes or curved space.

Cheers,
enegue

You are assuming that there isn't an aether which is moving. I am sure that fish don't think that the ocean has a current either. Note - Its the aether which has a speed which creates what we call 'gravity'.

[Steve3007]

enegue:

Gravity can't have speed because speed implies motion. Gravity doesn't move from one location to another, but CAUSES bodies to move from one location to another. This is true regardless of whether you adhere to the ideas of gravitons or EM ropes or curved space.

Both you and Xris (and possibly others) have also made this same point about light. i.e. we don't see it travelling, we only perceive its arrival. We see its' effect on an object at the destination.

Nevertheless, in the case of light, what we can do is observe a set of events separated by a period of time which we attribute to the same bunch of light. For example, we can observe one event: the firing of a laser pulse towards the moon, and about 2.5 seconds later observe another event: the reception of a light pulse from the direction of the moon. You can still argue that there is no sense in which we could possibly "see" a light pulse travelling to the moon and back, and that therefore the light doesn't do so. But the idea that this is what has happened is a very useful model to describe the events that we do see. And we know that, if we wanted to, we could place a detector at any point along that path to the Moon and confirm this model.

The same applies to gravity, except that current technology doesn't allow us to create "pulses" of gravity. But is it not possible to see, in principle, how the details of the gravitational influence by one body on another might lead us to conclude that there is a delay in that influence and that therefore it's useful, for at least some purposes, to think of that influence as "travelling" from one body to the other?

[Xris]

Steve the pin hole camera emphasises the fact that complex wave paterns could never give a clear picture of reality. The pin hole csmera is not receiving complex wave paterns. You are making the assumption and then strangely concluding it explains how complex waves can be deconstructed to create a picture of one pebble out of possibly millions. If you are ever given an explaination of how the pin hole camera operates it does not show waves but lines, why is that? Gaedes ropes are the only practical explanation of light and gravity. Waves or particles do not explain the phenomena we experience and observe. How can a wave act on a body to cause it to move? How can a particle, graviton, physically cause another particle to move without a mechanical explanation? The rope hypothesis is the only explaination that withstands investigation. A rope that causes tension and can transmit EM radiation has to be seriously considered.

[Xris]

Steve in response to your light travelling from the moon and back. How does a wave manage to retrace the path it takes considering the movement of the moon. Do the transmitters and receivers change their angle to accomodate the movement of the moon in relation to the Earth?

[Steve3007]

Xris:

On the pinhole camera:

Yes, diagrams of pinhole cameras generally show two lines, one from the bottom and one from the top of the object. So you are right to point out that diagrams miss out lots and lots of information about reality. That is true of all diagrams. It is one of their defining features. They show the parts of reality that are of particular interest for present purposes and illustrate them in idealized ways that are suited to present purposes. In fact, in the pinhole camera diagrams that I've designed for my own educational software I do try to address this, and the potential misunderstandings about the nature of light (i.e. that it somehow consists of straight lines that only go from objects to eyes) that might be caused by taking these diagrams in isolation.


On the subject of laser light bouncing off the retro-reflectors on the Moon:

The wave doesn't have to just retrace the path that it took. Again, this seems to me to be a misunderstanding based on the apparently very misleading ray-diagrams that we've discussed. The laser fired from Earth spreads out until, by the time it hits the Moon it is very wide. It spreads further when it bounces back. The signal received on Earth is millions of times weaker than the signal that was transmitted and is spread over a very, very wide area. If it retraced its path as you've described it would have almost the same strength and be just as narrow as when it was transmitted. Over short distances, lasers may look like they don't spread out, but they are light waves so they inevitably do. Diffraction is a fundamental part of their nature. Just not as much as other light sources, like torches.

P.S: Out of interest, I just looked it up. By the time the laser beam hits the moon it is about 4 miles wide. By the time it gets back to Earth it is about 100,000,000,000,000,000 times weaker than when it was transmitted. Meaning that it has spread out by that amount. By my rough calculations that would make it at least 1000 miles wide by the time it gets back to Earth.

[Xris]

Steve if you use an example in an attempt to clarify your argument it has to perform. The pin hole camera does the complete opposite to what you intended. You can only explain the image created by using straight lines. The inverted image and size of the opening indicates atom to atom contact. I have never seen an explanation nor diagram that uses complex 3 dimensional waves.

Going to BBQ Steve so I will return to the laser question later.

[DarwinX]

Yes, diagrams of pinhole cameras generally show two lines, one from the bottom and one from the top of the object. So you are right to point out that diagrams miss out lots and lots of information about reality. That is true of all diagrams. It is one of their defining features. They show the parts of reality that are of particular interest for present purposes and illustrate them in idealized ways that are suited to present purposes. In fact, in the pinhole camera diagrams that I've designed for my own educational software I do try to address this, and the potential misunderstandings about the nature of light (i.e. that it somehow consists of straight lines that only go from objects to eyes) that might be caused by taking these diagrams in isolation.

The spelling of the camera aperture is - diaphragm. The diaphragm only allows a sampling of light to enter, thus, it reduces the confusion of many light sources. Each point on the sensor plate or retina, only has one point of light source origin. Thus, the wave nature of light is converted into a digital information signal which the brain can convert into an image.

On the subject of laser light bouncing off the retro-reflectors on the Moon:

The wave doesn't have to just retrace the path that it took. Again, this seems to me to be a misunderstanding based on the apparently very misleading ray-diagrams that we've discussed. The laser fired from Earth spreads out until, by the time it hits the Moon it is very wide. It spreads further when it bounces back. The signal received on Earth is millions of times weaker than the signal that was transmitted and is spread over a very, very wide area. If it retraced its path as you've described it would have almost the same strength and be just as narrow as when it was transmitted. Over short distances, lasers may look like they don't spread out, but they are light waves so they inevitably do. Diffraction is a fundamental part of their nature. Just not as much as other light sources, like torches.

P.S: Out of interest, I just looked it up. By the time the laser beam hits the moon it is about 4 miles wide. By the time it gets back to Earth it is about 100,000,000,000,000,000 times weaker than when it was transmitted. Meaning that it has spread out by that amount. By my rough calculations that would make it at least 1000 miles wide by the time it gets back to Earth.

Good work! You have shown that the photon is a myth and was created by the science community to justify religious beliefs which support the bogus Big Bang Theory. You have also supported the aether theory by showing that the aether is the only medium that could support the light which is 'travelling' to the moon . Well done! Dayton Miller thanks you from his grave for your support.