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Do gravitons travel faster than the speed of light?
Is the speed of gravity faster than the speed of light as this article suggests?
9 Answers
- 1 decade agoFavorite Answer
There are some clues in the article if you read it carefully.
Note that the author claims that the universe became static after "creation week". Where have you read about a "creation week"? Note that the universe cannot be static. Either it expands or it will collapse.
Also the article claims that radioactive decay is accurate back to about 2000 b.c. Further note the reference to Abraham.
The article is a religious article carefully disguised as a scientific article.
Relativity has been checked many times and appears accurate every time it is checked. Should the sun suddenly disappear, the earth would continue in its' orbit for about 8 minutes, at which time it would no longer "feel" the influence of the sun.
No, the ultimate speed in local time-space is C, the speed of light. Notice I said "local" space time. Nothing prevents an area of space far away from moving away from us, which would allow an object to move faster than light relative to us - only that it cannot travel faster than light in its' own space-time fabric. Such an object could never be observed here on earth.
Best regards,
Jim
- Anonymous1 decade ago
I didnt read the whole article, but i got to the part oabout gravity moving a lot faster than c.
I don't think it can. According to Einstein's theory of relativity, if the sun were to be taken away suddenly, it would give out 'gravitational waves' that travel at the speed of light, meaning that the Earth wouldn't fly off at a tangent until 8 minutes after the Sun disappears.
The speed of light is the limit for transportation of information. The force of gravity is information i guess, and therefore, according to relativity, no. Gravitons do not travel faster than light. :)
- PercyLv 61 decade ago
Gravity is instantaneous in Newtonian physics, but NOT in general relativity, which is now known to be the more correct explanation. In general relativity (and quantum mechanics and in any upcoming unified field theory), gravity travels at the speed of light. I have linked to an article by Steve Carlip, a professor in quantum gravity at UC Davis for 18 years, which explains (in far greater detail than you probably wanted to know) all about the speed of gravity.
There are a number of problems with the KHouse article beyond the gravity claim. On the gravity claim in particular, the article he quotes as saying that gravity moves far faster than light comes from the "Meta Research web site". I'll simply quote the web site's front page and allow you to draw your own conclusions.
"Something has gone wrong in the field of astronomy. Many widely held beliefs fly in the face of observational evidence. Theories go through such contortions to resolve inconsistencies that the ideas can no longer be explained in simple language. Alternative ideas are often rejected out of hand simply because they challenge the status quo. The result... many of today's theories are unnecessarily complex.
Meta Research is dedicated to bringing some common sense back to this field. Here we challenge ideas that have consistently failed to make successful predictions, examine new paradigms, and advocate the ideas found to be most worthy of further consideration and testing."
- 4 years ago
Y guys may be conflating terms, and Einstein wasn t aware of the Higgs Boson. Still, mass distorts both space and time, and I m sure someone s considered the density of the Higgs Field is likely not uniform. So relatively speaking at the edges of space-time expansion (us included) particle dynamics are subject to the expansion rate of space-time. So C as the unbreakable speed of light remains impecable, but the expansion of space-time adds to that the more you go farther away,
- George NLv 71 decade ago
I just glanced at it, but I don't see where that is suggested.
The speed of gravity could not be faster than the speed of light. If it were, we'd see all sorts of goofy thing happening...like apples falling before they detach from the tree.
- ZikZakLv 61 decade ago
That article is a bunch of creationist crap. Scientists do not "gloss over" the finite speed of the effects of gravity, which propagate at c.
- Anonymous1 decade ago
no, gravity do not travel faster than the speed of light.
- Anonymous1 decade ago
they are the same speed