Wikipedia: Speed of gravity/Talk

I read this, and found that Josh Gross had totally removed the content that had been there. I have put back, so information wouldn't be lost. (I hope I haven't stepped on Ben Baker's toes...) Having read the article in the external links section, it was clear Josh was confusing speed of gravity with the speed of gravity waves. (A distinction pointed out in the external link page).

What the heck is the speed of gravity supposed to be, so that we can quantify it at all? Asking because I don't know. --LMS

The speed of gravity is the speed at which changes in the location of an object propagate to all other objects that are affected by the gravity of that object. (essentially the rest of the universe) A gravity wave is a fluctuation in the gravity field around an object, as I understand it.

Why didn't you just put that in the article, if it's correct? :LMS

Okay, I will. but I don't want to get in between a battle between Josh and Ben...

The changes in the location of an object are transmited by the interactions, graviational or electromagnetic. And for most anybody that is the speed of light.

I modified the article not removing the claims, but minimazing its importance (in my years of BS in physics, MS in Astronomy and PhD in Astronomy, never heard of this competing theories, except, I think to remember, as an historic thing). That doesn't by itself mean that it can not be correct, but it is far far away from mainstream science. --AN

Did you read Van Flandern's article ? I'd certainly like to see what flaws you detect in it. He seems to have thought about this a great deal. And yes, he does seem to address your concerns.

I don't think he agrees with you that those changes are transmitted by gravitational waves, nor electromagnetic waves.

I have left in the bit about a supernova, even though he argues they are irrelevant to this issue since the matter distribution from the explosion is symmetric.

Oh, we also need to decide if the link should be to [gravitational wave]? or [gravity wave]?. The article uses both, and they are presumably the same thing.

O.K. I read the article, and I found nothing obviously wrong, what doesn't mean there isn't. I removed the bit about SNe, because the author makes the distinction between gravitational waves (radiation) and the propagation of gravity, and accepts that propagation of radiation has speed c, so that will not prove anything. Still, this seems to be in the fringe of science, the site where the article is hosted has some other weird bits like the one about the "face" on Mars... It is clearly not the most accepted view, and apparently, not one that more that one person accepts. I don't see any of this published in Physics Reviews or any other peer refereed Jornal. This, again, doesn't mean by itself it is wrong, but it can be considered an instance of [expert testimony]?. I will leave the article as it is now, but i'm not sure i want to leave the link in gravity. --AN

Does the electric field even propogate? from what I understand of it, electromagnetic waves broadcast changes in velocity, not position. If acceleration = 0, there are no waves produced, and thus no propogation. The way I found best to think of it was that the electric field does not propogate, it is like a structure, when it changes velocity, however, the relativity induced length expansion/contraction changes the form of the field, and that change needs to propogate out. Sort of like when you stop a car quickly, you get thrown forward because the message of a change in speed needs to reach your body. Not the best analogy, since it isn't exact, but it's what I could come up with. Would gravitational waves work differently? I don't know enough about general relativity to answer, but my gut says they work the same.

They're supposed to work the same. As for the general acceptance of Flandern's work, it didn't take long to find that at one point he was a poster on sci.physics.relativity - many people who disagree with relativity are - and like most of them did not much impress the various people there who actually know what they are talking about. The first thing that came up is [this dejanews article] and you are welcome to agree or to disagree with it, but all in all I think the evidence establishes the Flandern does not have any credibility with workers in the field, and his material has not been peer-reviewed. Permission to remove discussion of his material, from special relativity at least? --Josh Grosse

I've come into this discussion cold, but I find it very frustrating that y'all are discussing an article that someone keeps removing the link to. I finally found it after looking through ump-teen versions. (And if they had been purged, I would have had NO way to find it... Would people just leave this link here, for the next soul who has some interest in it ?

http://www.ldolphin.org/vanFlandern/gravityspeed.html

Sigh. Van Flandern has been refuted *many* times. Most notably by Steve Carlip (an expert in General Relativity, and one of the editors of Classical and Quantum Gravity, the leading journal in the field). His ``most recent'' rebuttal of van Flandern's nonsense is at

http://xxx.lanl.gov/abs/gr-qc/9909087.

You can find tonnes more with a bit of searching: for example the Salon.com article

http://www.salon.com/people/feature/2000/07/06/einstein/index.html

or Chris Hillman's excellent rebuttal

http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/RelWWW/wrong.html#speed.

Frankly the idea of even having an article on the speed of gravity is a bit silly, at best it deserves a minor mention in a full article on general relativity. -M. Nobes

_____

Well, the question comes down to: Is the speed of gravity c (as a limit), or instantaneous? That should be easy enough to determine experimentally, yet nobody has, that I know of.

Carlip expounding on Van Flandern I'll read, he's a genuine practictioner of this stuff.

Hillman, OTOH, is suspected to be a simulacrum constructed for the purpose of opposing and confounding the undergrads. He's purportedly been graduated from U.W. for something like three years now, hasn't announced gainful employment, which is a nasty state of affairs for most PhD's. If he doesn't announce something -- like a Job -- in the next year or two, I'm going to have to conclude that the 'computer construct' thesis is correct, and that Chris Hillman doesn't -- in human terms -- exist.

 -- Stranger

It doesn't matter whether he is or not, though I've been on the physics newsgroups many times and never saw any evidence of him opposing and confounding undergrads. What matter is whether his arguments are reasonable or not, since from what I can tell, he's made every possible appeal for people to learn the material and check the sources for themselves.