From: Damien Broderick (damienb@unimelb.edu.au)
Date: Sat Jun 07 2003 - 22:44:45 MDT
>> Live on Tuesday's ECTV's 'Radio Hour', my guest Dr. Tom VanFlandren hit
>> us with an unexpected surprise. While discussing the inter-planetary
>> play of asteroid's, comets, and minor planets, Dr. VanFlandren disclosed
>> his ground breaking research with regard to the 'speed of gravity'.
See http://www.ldolphin.org/vanFlandern/gravityspeed.html
The Speed of Gravity - What the Experiments Say
Tom Van Flandern tomvf@metaresearch.org
Meta Research, Univ. of Maryland Physics, Army Research Lab 6327 Western
Ave., NW / Washington, DC 20015-2456 (metaresearch.org)
Abstract
Standard experimental techniques exist to determine the propagation speed
of forces. When we apply these techniques to gravity, they all yield
propagation speeds too great to measure, substantially faster than
lightspeed. 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 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. 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. Gravitational
radiation, which surely does propagate at lightspeed 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. Problems with the
causality 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. 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
spacetime with the propagation speed indicated by observational evidence
and experiments: not less than 2 x 10^10 c. Such a change of perspective
requires no change in the assumed character of gravitational radiation or
its lightspeed propagation. 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. Indeed, far from upsetting much of
current physics, the main changes induced by this new perspective are
beneficial to areas where 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. Recognition of
a faster-than-lightspeed propagation of gravity, as indicated by all
existing experimental evidence, may be the key to taking conventional
physics to the next plateau.
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