Quote:
Originally Posted by renormalised
Always someone has to spoil the party  
No, all it just means is that the information that's being carried by the gravitational field has arrived earlier than the information brought by its light. One just happens to be faster than the other. It just means that Einstein was wrong in thinking that light was the cosmic "speed limit", in so far as any information that was being sent to an observer. He is correct for visual information (light) but not for gravitational information, in this case.
In actual fact, neither condition is in violation of SR or GR, if you don't accept that light is the fastest carrier of information. In both their respective instance, neither light nor gravity can travel at infinite velocity in spacetime. That would be breaking SR and GR. What's being proposed is a modification and extension of SR and GR. People assume that both those theories at present are complete. They're not. Einstein himself never considered them as such.
To prove if this was correct or not, you could setup an experiment or make an observation of something where this process might be happening. |
From these statements and those in another thread lately, I feel you would benefit greatly from the study of any first-year physics textbook before generating misinformation and confusion.
Experiments have been done to confirm the prediction of General Relativity that gravity propagates at the speed of light. The experiment involved the study of a distant quasar being gravitationally lensed by Jupiter. The speed of gravity was found to be 1.06 times the speed of light (as I recall) which confirmed General Relativity to within the experimental error.