If the sun were, suddenly to dissapear
How long would it take for the Earth’s orbit to change?
Is gravity faster than the speed of light?
Though the speed of gravity cannot be more than the light speed, but the orbit of earth will change almost immediately after disappearing the sun.
With love,
Sanjay
If the speed of gravity is not more than light speed, it would take 8 minutes for the earths orbit to change. Your sentence seems to be contradictory, dear sir.
Yes, you are right.
I thought over it again and realized that made I mistake in visualisation. The orbit will start changing exactly after that time which light takes to reach to earth from the sun, because the affect of the gravity will remain in the system till then even after disappearing the sun.
With love,
Sanjay
So. you are saying that gravity travelles at the speed of light? What evidence do you have of this?
Actually it is all a little more complicated to calculate. The question is similar to the question of how fast a molecule of perfume would get across a 4 meter room. At a chosen temperature, the molecule might have a free velocity of about 400 m/s. But of course the molecule doesn’t travel straight across a room filled with air. It gets bumped millions of times and often wouldn’t ever get across the room at all. I remember calculating how fast such a thing takes place, but that was so long ago that I have no idea how it was done. Obviously the effective speed of that molecule would be far less than the free velocity.
Similarly, a gravity field is made of the same substance as a photon of light. But to be considered as a part of the “gravity field”, that substance must be scrambled in the directions of its travel. A light photon travels as a puff all headed the same direction. A “puff of gravity field” cannot travel. It must be reconstituted from point to point. And in the case of an instantly disappearing mass, the gravity field is disintegrating outward. So the issue is how fast a gravity field would disintegrate, not really how fast it “travels”.
The portion of the gravity field (a field of affectance, btw) that is yet unaware of the Sun’s disappearance (not counting the lowered light content) still functions as an attractor field, still doing what gravity does. And it is still causing the other portions of the field to gravitate together. So the field is actively trying to maintain itself, similar to, but no quite like a cloud of dispersing gas.
So the bottom line is that it might take quite a while longer than the 8 minutes for the dispersing gravity field to have any consequence on Earth. It might be many times slower, possibly a half hour or more.
An interesting side note would be that as the gravity field diminished, any light still traveling through it would travel faster than before. So that “8 minutes” would get shorter.
It will be difficult for me to explain but I will try.
First of all, your question asks about the speed of change, not the gravity.
At very basic level, everything travels at the speed of the light but that does not reflect on the net level on bigger objects. They movement is the net result of enumerable small movements. That applies to gravity.
But, the change will always happen at the speed of the light. It cannot happen slower or faster.
With love,
Sanjay
Sounds like a vague answer.
I believe Science should do an experiment on this.
James,
First of all, realise my understanding about this issue is based on what more or less I grasped from you during our discussion in different threads in the past.
I do not think that the earth will take more time to change its orbit, than that time what light takes to reach the earth from the sun. Both events will take exactly the same time.
Remember, I am not talking about the speed of light but that time, which the light exactly takes in reaching to earth from the sun.
The term of “speed of light” seems to be a bit confusing to me when I look at it from the perspective of AO. Normally, the science assume that the actual speed of light is that, by which speed light travels in the vaccum, but as per AO, there is no absolute vaccum, so how can we ever determine the precise speed of light?
The only thing that we can know according to AO, is the maximum speed of change, and we take it as a speed of light, but it is only a metaphor, not the actual speed of the light.
The same applies in this case too. The earth will change its orbit exactly after the same time, in which the light reaches to it from the sun, no matter what the spped of the light is. The real issue is the speed of change, not the light.
Did I get it right or wrong?
With love,
Sanjay
Yes, my answer is both incomplete and vague too. The problem is that, it needs a very long explanation to convey the concept. Secondly, I am not eligible for it either. James can explain it better. My answer to you is based of his theory of RM/AO.
With love,
Sanjay
Secondly, it is quite possible to test it empirically through building some rolling arrangements of electric magnates, where one magnate will be at the centre, while the other one will rotate around it. And, the centre magnate can be forced to disappear by taking its current off.
With love,
Sanjay
Why hasnt science done this at the LHC? I smell a conspiracy.
That might be more true than I would have thought.
I was familiar with a gravity wave generator project involving an extremely fast spinning, ultra perfectly spherical ball of a special alloy. I just looked online to see how that project had gone and I can’t find anything about it but rather the term “gravity wave” seems to now mean the waves that you see in clouds. How they connect waves of clouds with gravity waves seems a bit … emmm … far fetched.
I appreciate that.
So what part of my explanation did you not understand?
There are two ways. If you know the space density in two different gravity settings and can measure the light propagation time in both, you can then extrapolate to zero and know that fundamental absolute speed of light in an absolute vacuum, even though that vacuum could never exist.
The second way is how they have actually done it, which is to simply define an exact speed of light as being close to the average of what they measured and if they ever measure anything more precisely, they change the definition of a meter or a second to match their definition of the speed of light.
Well, no, not merely a metaphor. PtA is the same as electric potential. And electromagnetic radiation, EMR, is the same as propagating affect. So when you measure the speed of EMR (not necessarily light), you are measuring the speed of affect (or “of change”).
Light isn’t quite as they probably taught you in that it is not a wave like a very short radio wave. Light comes in the form of “puffs” (produced by atomic orbit collapse). Higher energy puffs are more dense and that gives an equivalence to those puffs being merely like short high frequency radio waves. You can calculate using the idea that light is merely a high frequency radio wave, but it isn’t. In a sense, light is merely a puff of higher density space (ie “Affectance” - ultra minuscule EMR pulses/waves). Each “photon” is merely a small cloud of affectance that has an effective total frequency corresponding to radio waves and our colors. The puff is made of affectance that is traveling in a uniform direction through the substrata of gravity field (mass field - randomized affectance).
And those puffs have to travel through other puffs as well as mass fields (“gravity fields”) of higher than absolute zero space density. The higher the mass field, the slower the light will travel. That is why light bends around heavy objects in space, bends when passing a sharp corner of material, and bends going through materials.
A mass object is merely a much higher density of the gravity field around it. That gravity field can’t move at the speed of light for the same reason the higher concentration of it, the mass, can’t. A mass field (and the object itself) is randomly scrambled affectance. Because it is randomly scrambled, its constituency isn’t traveling in a uniform direction. And if the field was to become uniform in the direction of its affectance propagations by some magic, it would simply become light, a puff of uniformly propagating affectance.
Thus when you are talking about gravity waves (actual gravity propagation waves, not clouds in the sky), you are talking about the propagation of extremely light weight mass spread over a region so thinly that you cannot see it at all, but clearly see through it. A gravity field is an invisible mass field. And for that mass field to propagate a change in its density it must behave very largely like a mass object trying to move through space. Both the object (the significantly higher density affectance) and the gravity field are held together by the random motion within. And like a sound wave, the sound cannot travel as fast as the individual air molecules that make up the wave. The waves are merely changes in the density of the medium, air for sound, affectance for gravity.
And the Earth will not feel any change in gravity effects until the mass field collapses, like gas escaping from a container - its density drops off slower than the gas molecules are leaving. The density of the Sun’s mass field would drop off much slower than the bits of affectance are individually leaving (at the speed of “light”).
You couldn’t use magnets. A magnetic field is a different issue. A magnetic field is a compressed affectance field. The speed of decompression supersedes that of dissipation. A magnetic field collapse is different than a simple mass field collapse.
No.
Your running into thermodynamic paradox here. Your assuming the parts are not the sum of the whole, and that Gravity and direction relates to the sub-atomic, and not the atomic.
This is weird, as your scrambled gravity field involved the attractor/attracting would require a whole other force to redirect it against every other particle already aligned directionally with the big bang.
You just invented a force to explain a sub atomic force that moves parallel to normal atomic effects of gravity, that you can recode… and it somehow wouldn’t just fall out of the universe instantly as it would cease to be relativistic (if its coded against the direction of everything, it can’t go with the flow, bye bye).
If it even could stay somewhat in our big-bang space, it would appear to be moving extremely fast, way faster than the speed of light, because the whole universe would be moving away from it.
Furthermore, it would imply another level of the universe with its own directions exist independently of time and space; if you could code something to move in a way not in accord with everything else in the universe, how is it doing that? Weird exotic forces never before contemplated would occur around this object if it was to transverse through spacetime and had a capacity to interact. It would make the hypothetical particles inside a singularity seem down right commonplace in comparison.
I wouldn’t even know his to deal with the conservation of mass implications. It could very well be happening everywhere if its this simple. Universe itself might just fall apart. Kiss relativity bye-bye.
Well, which thermodynamic property are you worried about? The “Second Law of Thermodynamics” was bogus from the start (Maxwell explained why some 135 years ago), if that is the one you are referring to. The conservation “laws” are not being challenged at all.
I don’t know what you are talking about, but I am pretty certain that you don’t know what I am talking about either.
Emmm … no. RM:AO has no forces involved. Perhaps read up on it a little here: Rational Metaphysics: From Void to Inertia, Mass, Momentum, Particles, and Gravity
Well, that is going to happen anyway.
Researching a little on this topic of gravitational propagation, it seems that there has been an interesting and convoluted history concerning this question.
It seems that someone presumed that Newton would have insisted on instantaneous gravitational propagation, although I have never seen anything that would have implied that from Newton’s force theories. As far as I can tell, the subject wasn’t approached in his time. I suspect a strawman argument is being used.
Throughout the 1800’s it seems that a great deal of theorizing sprang up. It is obvious that no one during that era knew anything about why gravitation works and thus their theories were entirely speculative, and some, a bit bizarre. And as with all physics theories, everyone is now required to bow to Relativity, despite its rather blatant problems. And it seems that relativity might require that any gravitational alteration MUST propagate at the speed of light. I don’t know why General Relativity would require a “bend” in spacetime to propagate at any particular speed, although obviously it could never exceed light speed. Special relativity could get involved because if things move in the wrong way, the SRT equations won’t work.
And then I read this little bit on Wiki (today - might change tomorrow):
At that point I was all ready to declare “Bullshit!”
But then I read on:
So okay, apparently there is at least some degree of verification still going on now and then.
This could possibly be a subject where RM:AO could stand out. It seems by the accepted theories to date (still all quite sketchy) that it is believed that gravitational speed is equal to light speed. RM:AO says that such is not true, although possibly close. The problem is that it is a very hard thing to calculate and test.
If you ask the reverse question, “How fast would a planet feel the effect of a Sun instantly appearing” the picture gets a little more clear. Gravity fields must grow. They are not merely projected out from a mass. A mass object that instantly appears, must accumulate and inspire its ambient gravity field. I know this to be true because I have emulated that much. And that field does not grow anywhere close to as fast as light speed, much, much slower.
But of course masses don’t ever instantly do anything. So how can a practical, empirical test be made?
When masses move, a portion of the surrounding mass field moves with them at the same speed (assuming no accelerating forces involved). But the amount of the field that moves with the mass object varies, not only in percentage but also with distance from the mass center (the closer one gets to the object, the more of its mass field moves with it, similar to the concept of “aether drag”). Earth’s gravity has a slight lag in space location as the Earth is traveling.
Relativists would try to calculate and blame that effect on relative motion, SRT. But the simpler truth is that every mass has to grow its gravitational field and when it is always moving, it is always leaving a little behind and can’t quite catch up before it moves away more. So the result will be that a moving planet’s bubble/cloud of gravity will be slightly skewed toward the rear of the planet’s motion as if being dragged along (but not truly being dragged). Again, this is something that I could emulate, although haven’t at the moment.
And perhaps of minor interest is that if a moving planet was to instantly vanish, for a short while it’s gravitational field would keep moving, ghosting the course of the former planet for a short while. After the planet vanished, objects would still be drawn toward where the planet had been headed, not merely where it was when it vanished. A satellite would still orbit as if the planet was still there and moving as before. Although I would expect that effect to die out pretty quickly. How quickly is the question.
If you were to spin two connected canon balls at a very high speed (in a sealed vacuum), just outside the orbital path, the variations in mass attraction, gravity, could be felt and measured as each ball quickly passed. But that gravitational wave being felt would not extend or propagate very far. And the faster the balls spun, the less propagation would take place, opposite of charge propagation effects. In fact, if you could spin the balls at half the speed of light, you would probably measure almost no waves at all as the field became somewhat uniform and also find a reduction in average mass attraction toward the balls, as if they were losing mass. But that isn’t exactly a practical experiment.
James,
I have already looked at this question from the reverse angle, means what would happen if a sun comes up all of a sudden.
I gone through all your posts in this thread and I think that I got it mostly. And, there is nothing much with which I disagree. Almost all that was also broadly in my mind when I answered Tixie for the second time.
But James, it seems to me that Tixie did not ask what you answered.
There can be two questions.
- When will the earth start changing its orbit?
- When will the earth completely change its orbit?
I think that both questions will have different answers. The earth will start changing its orbit after exactly the same time, when the last photon emitted by the disappeared sun would reach at the earth. The process of changing the orbit would start but it would not be a one-off change. It will take some time to complete. I do not know how much but by that time, last gravity cloud manifested by the disappeared sun would hit and cross the earth.
The same would happen in the case of appearing a sudden sun. The orbit of the earth would start changing its course as soon as the very first photon from that sun would hit the earth. Yes, that chance will be infinitely small, almost impossible to calculate or measure, bit there would be change for sure. Then, the new sun will start forming its complete gravity clouds, which will start propagating in all directions. These gravity clouds will also take some time to reach at their maximum.
These gravity clouds will hit the earth in the same order, from 1 to maximum, and them maintain the maximum as far as the sun exists.
The point is, the first photon reaching at the earth is also a part of gravity field, no matter how small it may be. As per AO, all bodies are made from affectance. Thus, when even the first and single photon from the new sun will hit the earth, it will affect the earth for sure. The change in the orbit will start from that very moment too.
With love,
Sanjay
Kind of like a ripple.
I am used to thinking of gravity as an attribute of mass, not a consequence of mass. Why is it not so?
I was wondering if that is what you were talking about. Is that your reasoning, that the photons themselves are the first touch of gravity change?
I tried to point out earlier that even though a photon and a small cloud of mass field are made of the same substance, there is a critical difference. A light photon is a puff of uniformly propagating affectance. A mass field is extremely randomized affectance.
That difference is significant because a photon striking Earth will not cause any attraction to the Sun at all. In fact, it will help propel the Earth away. When absorbed, photons add to the momentum in the direction they were headed. So when the sunlight stops hitting Earth, the Earth would actually momentarily be drawn more toward the Sun because the solar wind pressure had been suddenly removed while the mass field close to Earth was still stable.
And now that I think about it a little more, the Earth’s mass field would actually help retard any changes in the Sun’s portion of that field. The two fields overlap (and aren’t really “two separate fields”, but you know what I mean) and the more concentrated regions, near the Sun and near the Earth will change slower because they are actually “mass”, merely extremely thin, light mass (scrambled affectance).
It still might be true that an ultra minuscule change in the mass field will occur at Earth at the speed of light, but I am not certain why to believe that yet and I am pretty certain that isn’t the kind of ultra, ultra small effect that Trix was asking about.
It was taught from Newton days that mass had the property of gravitational force. Starting shortly after Einstein, it was taught that mass is merely bent spacetime. In both cases the notion of gravitation is seen as being “caused by” the mass (or bent spacetime). But actually the reverse is just as true: mass is caused by an increase in the a mass field (“gravitational field”) or more precisely, an increase in Affectance density to the point where the higher concentration goes asymptotic and grows with the surrounding mass field.
And the whole “bent spacetime” is merely a perspective used to calculate certain situations. It has nothing to do with reality.
The only time the mass object (the highest concentration of affectance) comes before the associated mass field is when the object is propelled very quickly into a region and even then, as explained before, some of the mass field accompanies the object at the same velocity as the object. And if that object was to very suddenly stop, a portion of the mass field surrounding it would sway past the object before settling more uniformly around the object. Mass field have their own momentum.
So what we call “mass” and what we call a “gravity field” are actually made of the same substance, affectance, but one is very, very concentrated and the other is very, very unconcentrated. The following anime displays the proportions of concentrations between what we call the “mass particle” and the ambient mas field known as “gravity field”.
