So instantaneous gravity seemed to have an element of magic to it. But mediation requires propagation, and finite bodies should be incapable of propagate at infinite speeds since that would require infinite energy. In the first place, it seemed to be a form of “action at a distance.” Perhaps no one has so elegantly expressed the objection to such a concept better than Sir Isaac Newton: “That one body may act upon another at a distance through a vacuum, without the mediation of any thing else, by and through which their action and force may be conveyed from one to the other, is to me so great an absurdity, that I believe no man who has in philosophical matters a competent faculty of thinking, can ever fall into it” (See Hoffman, 1983). The most amazing thing I was taught as a graduate student of celestial mechanics at Yale in the 1960s was that all gravitational interactions between bodies in all dynamical systems had to be taken as instantaneous. Recognition of a faster-than-light-speed propagation of gravity, as indicated by all existing experimental evidence, may be the key to taking conventional physics to the next plateau. Physics has been struggling, such as explaining experimental evidence for non-locality in quantum physics, the dark matter issue in cosmology, and the possible unification of forces. Indeed, far from upsetting much of current physics, the main changes induced by this new perspective are beneficial to areas where Although faster-than-light force propagation speeds do violate Einstein special relativity (SR), they are in accord with Lorentzian Relativity, which has never been experimentally distinguished from SR-at least, not if favor of SR.
Such a change of perspective requires no change in the assumed character of gravitational radiation or its light-speed propagation. These causality problems would be solved without any change to the mathematical formalism of GR, but only to its interpretation, if gravity is once again taken to be a propagating force of nature in flat Space-Time with the propagation speed indicated by observational evidence and experiments: not less than 2x10 10c.
GRAVITY WAVES FASTER THAN LIGHT UPDATE
Problems with theĬausality principle also exist for GR in this connection, such as explaining how the external fields between binary black holes manage to continually update without benefit of communication with the masses hidden behind event horizons. Gravitational radiation, which surely does propagate at light-speed but is a fifth order effect in v/c, is too small to play a role in explaining this difference in behavior between gravity and ordinary forces of nature. General relativity (GR) explains these features by suggesting that gravitation, unlike electromagnetic forces, is a pure geometric effect of curved Space-Time, not a force of nature that propagates.
By contrast, the finite propagation speed of light causes radiation pressure forces to have a non-radial component causing orbits to decay (the “Poynting-Robertson effect”) but gravity has no counterpart force proportional to v/c to first order. This is because gravity, in contrast to light, has no detectable aberration or propagation delay for its action, even for cases (such as binary pulsars) where sources of gravity accelerate significantly during the light time from source to target.
When we apply these techniques to gravity, they all yield propagation speeds too great to measure, substantially faster than light-speed. Standard experimental techniques exist to determine the propagation speed of forces. THE SPEED OF GRAVITY - WHAT THE EXPERIMENTS SAY
0 kommentar(er)
