[Dan Day]

I would think that measurements of earth's acceleration toward the sun that show a direction that is 8.3 minutes ahead of the apparent position of the sun in the sky also demonstrate a propagation speed that is virtually (at these distances) instantaneous. That is, the earth is not accelerating toward where "gravity waves" are supposedly reaching the earth together with the photons that left the sun 8.3 minutes previously but toward where the sun actually is.

But where the "sun actually is" doesn't really move that much, relative to the Earth. Don't let the apparent "movement" of the sun across the sky as the Earth rotates fool you.

The Sun pretty much sits in the same spot (i.e., right in the middle of the solar system), so there's no testable difference between the effect its gravity has on our orbit if "instantaneous", versus the effect it would have 8.3 minutes delayed.

If the Sun actually *were* circling the Earth in the way it *appears* to, then yeah, an 8.3 minute difference in gravity would be measurable. But then, it would also be circling us at over two million miles per hour (3% of the speed of light)...

[aruanan]

The Sun pretty much sits in the same spot (i.e., right in the middle of the solar system), so there's no testable difference between the effect its gravity has on our orbit if "instantaneous", versus the effect it would have 8.3 minutes delayed.

If the Sun actually *were* circling the Earth in the way it *appears* to, then yeah, an 8.3 minute difference in gravity would be measurable. But then, it would also be circling us at over two million miles per hour (3% of the speed of light)...

Thanks for demonstrating a. your inability to understand what was said or b. your unwillingness to acknowledge what was said.

[aruanan]

Here is the summary portion of today's press release from Tom Flandern on the Kopeikin paper:

Summary

• S. Kopeikin misquotes Van Flandern as predicting that cg (Kopeikin’s “speed of gravity”) will be infinity. Van Flandern and Vigier are in print showing that six experiments better than Kopeikin’s already show that the speed of gravity is >> c (c = speed of light). But in posted discussions with Kopeikin and in USENET newsgroups, Van Flandern clearly states that Kopeikin’s “cg” parameter cannot be the speed of gravity and will certainly come out near the value c, as it did.

n     Asada followed up Kopeikin’s Astrophysical Journal paper with his own paper in the same journal showing that Kopeikin was simply measuring a quantity that propagated at the speed of light, and was definitely not measuring the speed of gravity.

n      Kopeikin has mostly ignored these well-founded corrections, apparently because he justified funding for his experiment by the claim that it would measure the speed of gravity.

n     Kopeikin new paper at the Los Alamos archive shockingly revises his protocol, equations, and methodology. Scientific method forbids changing the protocol after the results are in, especially when it is done to avoid an unwanted or unexpected result.

n      Kopeikin’s new equations introduce a new factor, c/cg, for time in the Einstein equations. This factor drives time intervals to zero for large values of cg, thereby making large cg results *impossible* for any experimental data regardless of reality.

n      Kopeikin’s now-forced results do a great disservice to science in general and the advancement of physics in particular because they no longer represent what his own experiment showed, much less the speed of gravity. 

I'll post the entire press release when it's online and I've gotten permission to do so.