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To: RightWhale
Albert Einstein may have been right that gravity travels at the same speed as light but, contrary to a claim made earlier this year, the theory has not yet been proven. A scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) says the announcement by two scientists, widely reported this past January, about the speed of gravity was wrong.

If the idea of gravity propagating at light speed is a requirement of relativity, then it's time relativity was dropped. Gravity is known by experiment to propagate either instantaneously or close enough thereto that our best instruments cannot tell the difference.

Tom Van Flandern's page on the topic at Metaresearch notes that:

By contrast, gravitational forces are large, readily detected, and control the dynamics of most of the visible universe. Gravimeters easily detect the gravitational force from, and motion of, a person entering a room, for example. The propagation speed of gravitational force is bounded by six experiments to be much faster than the speed of light.
[[5]]. For example:

Van Flandern stops just short of calling Kopeikin an outright fraud.

268 posted on 06/27/2003 9:58:47 AM PDT by martianagent
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To: martianagent
"Modern, high-precision solar system observations show that the direction from which the Sun's light comes, and the direction toward which the Sun's gravity pulls us, are not the same. The former is retarded by the time it takes light to travel from Sun to Earth, 8.3 minutes; and the latter is not retarded by any detectible amount."

And that's *precisely* what we've been discussing on this thread.

270 posted on 06/27/2003 10:13:48 AM PDT by Southack (Media bias means that Castro won't be punished for Cuban war crimes against Black Angolans in Africa)
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To: martianagent
Gravimeters easily detect the gravitational force from, and motion of, a person entering a room

The person would be so kind as to enter the room 100 times so we can do a least squares analysis.

271 posted on 06/27/2003 10:16:22 AM PDT by RightWhale (gazing at shadows)
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