Speed of Gravity

Page 2 - Seeking answers about space? Join the Space community: the premier source of space exploration, innovation, and astronomy news, chronicling (and celebrating) humanity's ongoing expansion across the final frontier.
Perhaps this may help...

Einstein’s GR (General Relativity) predicted that if a jolt, somehow, was given to the fabric of space (i.e. spacetime) then powerful waves would propagate from such an event. [ He first thought this wouldn't be the case, but he seems to have changed his mind.] A simple analogy would be when we throw rocks into water and watch waves form and move outward in rings.

GR says that mass will affect the shape of spacetime, and spacetime will affect the direction mass will travel. So if a sudden shift in mass (e.g. collision of two colossal masses) will generate a shift of spacetime in such a dramatic way that massive waves will necessarily emanate from that event, similar to water waves that come from a rock making a splash. [I preferred a cannon ball off the diving board for wave generation over, say, the “can opener”. The later did provide more splash, however. :)]

These gravity waves are, nevertheless, very hard to measure since these “splashes” don’t happen nearby, thankfully. But LIGO and others have measured a few of them, verifying GR, once again. The wave from a billion lightyears, for instance, alters spacetime here by only a fraction of the width of a proton.

Also, the wave itself diminishes in a linear way and not by the inverse square law, so that helps in finding them.

But even small events such as asteroid impacts, planets passing close to one another, etc, will create lesser waves. These would be like tiny ripples on an ocean when a tiny gust of wind suddenly blows down on the water, but these waves don’t combine into something significant. Surfers know that big waves come from wind blowing over the surface over hundreds of miles that continually reinforce a little wave into it becoming a big wave. I’ve never seen any of them square, though I loved to surf.

So like water waves, the millions of waves crossing one another don’t create havoc for ships as only large ones crossing over one another will make peaks combine into something more than expected, but only very briefly. Waves from millions, or billions, of lightyears away from one another aren’t going to combine into anything unusual.

Gravity should not be considered an electromagnetic phenomena. It is one of the big 4 forces, though the weakest of them – strong nuclear force, weak nuclear force, electromagnetic force and gravity. It doesn’t emit photons (EM). [It may emit gravitons (per one or more theories about gravity).]

Einstein’s work to seek the combination of all the forces was never about saying they were the same or equivalent (IIRC). Only a super extreme circumstance would combine them, which would likely took place in the first nanoseconds of the Big Bang.

Einstein did argue against the aether by explaining the null result from the Michelson-Morley experiment by claiming its existence was superfluous – light propagated through space without the need for an aether. He wasn’t saying there was no aether only that it was unnecessary to give it much consideration since it has no apparent effects.
 
Post #19 says "I don’t believe there is a speed of gravity… I absolutely believe it is instantaneous… Or rather that it doesn’t move at all.., that it is, with scientific proof and logic, a static charge that persists throughout the cosmos in real-time and that any changes in any part of the cosmos are instantly felt in every other part of the cosmos. It does everything the ancient Greeks knew Aether was needed for… As a medium to carry information and to bind the universe together…Static and binding so that everything instantly knows how to react to stay in balance with everything else…"

FYI. This is quite a concept. LIGO reports gravity waves detected from various black hole mergers, neutron star mergers dated to some 100 million or more than one billion years ago, e.g. http://www.scientificamerican.com/a...observatory-finds-more-colliding-black-holes/, "The second confirmation of ripples in spacetime is announced by astronomers at LIGO"…"The newfound gravitational waves began about 1.4 billion years ago in the merger of two black holes—one about 14 times and the other about eight times the mass of the sun—that had gradually circled closer and closer to each other and eventually smashed together, according to scientists’ calculations."

My observation. If gravity waves propagate through space at *instantaneous* speed, such events never happened billions or millions of years ago. LIGO is recording recent events and that would be true for all events seen now according to this post (*instantly felt in every...*). The explanation overthrows the 13.8 billion years old universe in the BB model. There would be no light-time either in Special Relativity. What does this suggest? A very young universe concept is likely presented in post #19 vs. BB cosmology model age for the universe.
I have a feeling gravity is a wave but travels between fluctuation in void space that does not interact with fluctuation but can leave a wave at C on it because fluctuation is time and space so it can only travel at C in it.

Fits nicely with the duality of everything to have gravity have a duality.
Instant speed through space without time and C speed in space with time (fluctuation)

Like you said though gravity could just as easily be a compression of fluctuation and not move at all, just instant compression with the wave traveling in C.

Now if you remove all of the empty space in the universe, atomic, fluctuation, quantum leap distance, nuclear force and more.
We end up with a universe that is little more than a dot.
Traveling from one side of a dot to the other takes almost no time.
Gravity might simply see the universe as a dot traveling in all that void space.
 
Perhaps this may help...

Einstein’s GR (General Relativity) predicted that if a jolt, somehow, was given to the fabric of space (i.e. spacetime) then powerful waves would propagate from such an event. [ He first thought this wouldn't be the case, but he seems to have changed his mind.] A simple analogy would be when we throw rocks into water and watch waves form and move outward in rings.

GR says that mass will affect the shape of spacetime, and spacetime will affect the direction mass will travel. So if a sudden shift in mass (e.g. collision of two colossal masses) will generate a shift of spacetime in such a dramatic way that massive waves will necessarily emanate from that event, similar to water waves that come from a rock making a splash. [I preferred a cannon ball off the diving board for wave generation over, say, the “can opener”. The later did provide more splash, however. :)]

These gravity waves are, nevertheless, very hard to measure since these “splashes” don’t happen nearby, thankfully. But LIGO and others have measured a few of them, verifying GR, once again. The wave from a billion lightyears, for instance, alters spacetime here by only a fraction of the width of a proton.

Also, the wave itself diminishes in a linear way and not by the inverse square law, so that helps in finding them.

But even small events such as asteroid impacts, planets passing close to one another, etc, will create lesser waves. These would be like tiny ripples on an ocean when a tiny gust of wind suddenly blows down on the water, but these waves don’t combine into something significant. Surfers know that big waves come from wind blowing over the surface over hundreds of miles that continually reinforce a little wave into it becoming a big wave. I’ve never seen any of them square, though I loved to surf.

So like water waves, the millions of waves crossing one another don’t create havoc for ships as only large ones crossing over one another will make peaks combine into something more than expected, but only very briefly. Waves from millions, or billions, of lightyears away from one another aren’t going to combine into anything unusual.

Gravity should not be considered an electromagnetic phenomena. It is one of the big 4 forces, though the weakest of them – strong nuclear force, weak nuclear force, electromagnetic force and gravity. It doesn’t emit photons (EM). [It may emit gravitons (per one or more theories about gravity).]

Einstein’s work to seek the combination of all the forces was never about saying they were the same or equivalent (IIRC). Only a super extreme circumstance would combine them, which would likely took place in the first nanoseconds of the Big Bang.

Einstein did argue against the aether by explaining the null result from the Michelson-Morley experiment by claiming its existence was superfluous – light propagated through space without the need for an aether. He wasn’t saying there was no aether only that it was unnecessary to give it much consideration since it has no apparent effects.
Orbital mechanics become problematic though with E's idea about gravity.
Relativity of gravity fits pretty well but as soon as you limit gravity speed to C orbit mechanics start to break down.

For sure we are missing something very basic about the nature of gravity and it's ability to either instantly communicate or instantly warp everything everywhere so orbital mechanics don't get off track.

I like the idea of duality gravity, it's instant speed and it's C wave.
Then the gravity waves of relativity work well and orbital mechanics also work well.
 
So like water waves, the millions of waves crossing one another don’t create havoc for ships as only large ones crossing over one another will make peaks combine into something more than expected, but only very briefly. Waves from millions, or billions, of lightyears away from one another aren’t going to combine into anything unusual.
Perfect, this is the best example that I have ever seen in this field!
This is what I wanted to say before, in the 25th post even if there were some mistakes that now I want to correct.
I have just discovered that the gravitational waves aren't particular or exepecial. They have all the features of the other waves and like them they are made od particles, the gravitons.
This is just a correction of my first and wrong thought.