Wednesday, September 08, 2010

What is the Speed of Gravity?

Nice posting on What is the Speed of Gravity?. "According to Newton, you have two masses separated by a distance, and that determines the force. You take one of those masses away, and the force instantly goes away. End of story. But in general relativity, things are much more intricate, and incredibly interesting. First off, it isn't mass, per se, that causes gravity. Rather, all forms of energy (including mass) affect the curvature of space. So for the Sun and the Earth, the incredibly large mass of the Sun dominates the curvature of space, and the Earth travels in an orbit along that curved space."

"So, in theory, we know that the speed of gravity should be the same as the speed of light. But the Sun's force of gravity out here, by us, is far too weak to measure this effect. In fact, it gets really hard to measure, because if something moves at a constant velocity in a constant gravitational field, there's no observable affect at all. What we'd want, ideally, is a system that has an object moving with a changing velocity through a changing gravitational field. What would that take? Something intense, like two neutron stars orbiting each other extremely close together! Occasionally, we get very lucky, and a neutron star emits very regular blips of light, pulsing with incredible precision: this makes it a pulsar! If one of these neutron stars is a pulsar aimed at us, we can test whether gravity moves at the speed of light or not!"

2 comments:

Unknown said...

pyThe speed of gravity
Newton said the speed of gravity is infinite but according to Einstein (and some nifty interstellar measurements), it most certainly is not.

Newton is right.

We know that even the light cannot escape black holes. Why? There is only one possibility that gravitational force pulls light with greater speed than the speed of light. The speed of gravitational wave is many times higher than the speed of light at black holes. On Earth gravity is subordinate to electromagnetic wave but on black holes electromagnetic wave is subordinate to gravitational force.

The Universe includes everything that exists. In the Universe there are billions and billions of stars. These stars are distributed in the space in huge clusters. They are held together by gravitation and are known as galaxies. Sun is also a star. Various members of the solar system are bound to it by gravitation force. Gravitation force is the ultimate cause of birth and death of galaxy, star and planets etc. Gravitation can be considered as the cause of various forms of animate and inanimate existence. Human form is superior to all other forms. Withdrawal of gravitational wave from some plane of action is called the death of that form. It can be assumed that gravitation force is ultimate creator. Source of it is 'God'. Gravitational Field is the supreme soul (consciousness) and its innumerable points of action may be called as individual soul (consciousness). It acts through body and mind. Body is physical entity. Mind can be defined as the function of autonomic nervous system. Electromagnetic waves are its agents through which it works. This can be realized through the practice of meditation and yoga under qualified meditation instruction. This can remove misunderstanding between science and religion and amongst various religions. This is the gist of all religious teachings - past, present and future.

Howard said...

You've been reading too much Deepak Chopra. Try reading some science books.