[Southack]

"3. All motion is relative, fields are defined everywhere, even if they're zero, and the only part of a field that needs to propagate is the changes to the field."

There is a discrepancy with that potential answer (which essentially claims that the only propagation that counts are the *changes* to a field rather than the field's propagation itself).

Since we already know that *changes* to a field propagate at the speed of Light, the above answer can't explain why the planets aren't orbiting the Sun's previous location back when Gravity left the Sun to travel to the planets.

The delay for Light going from the Sun to the Earth is 8.3 minutes, for instance, giving the Sun 8.3 minutes of movement from its old location.

So why isn't the Earth orbiting around the Sun's *old* position rather than around the Sun's present position?

Or put another way, under that potential answer there would be an 8.3 minute delay from the time that the Sun (or an electromagnet in another example) was turned off until those speed of light *changes* reached the Earth to permit the Earth to fly off tangentally to its old orbit...a delay that we do NOT see in respect to where the Earth's horizontal orbitital plane is currently centered.

[Physicist]

So why isn't the Earth orbiting around the Sun's *old* position rather than around the Sun's present position?

From the perspective of any point in the field, the sun is still in its old position. The field moves along with the sun. If something accelerates the sun, then the field will adjust to reflect the new position...but it will take 8.3 minutes for that change to register out here.

You really need to abandon this idea of absolute motion. Even Galileo knew better than that.