Light and its supposed speed.

[Jbuza]

gone

[BGoodForGoodSake]

actually I read somewhere, although I can't remember exactley where, that gravity being transmitted at the speed of light is an impossibility.

IT has something to do with the preservation of angular momentum. The earth is attracted to the center of the sun, not to the relative position where the sun was 8.5 minutes ago.

I can assure you that this is incorrect, in the equations resulting from general relativity the direction of influence formerly known as gravitational "force" in newtonion physics is not directly the sun, but somewhat off center. If an object is moving at a constant velocity the delay from propagation is cancelled out, thus leaving one with the same calculated results as one would get from classic Newtonion physics.

There seems to be a very apparent lack on agreement on what the speed of gravity propogation is. I believe that Einstein felt that it didn't propogate as such, but rather simply changed the substance of space whereever the mass was.

nope. Einstein assumed it traveled at the speed of light.

I don't know sometimes some of this stuff gets so complex that it is almost worthless as far as promoting an understanding of the world we live in.

If it seems too complex it is only because you haven't yet tackled the material.

[Jbuza]

gone

[BGoodForGoodSake]

There is a lot of debate on the speed of gravity.

The Speed of Gravity - Repeal of the Speed Limit
http://metaresearch.org/cosmology/gravi ... _limit.asp

There are some blatant errors here, however too technical to explain. However the article does bring up some interesting points. I suggest you do some research into general relativity, and the actual mathmatics involved.

Also the article I posted earlier has some to say about speed of gravity and why it must be much faster than light.

http://www.blazelabs.com/f-p-inst.asp

This goes outside GE which is internally consistent with observations (so far). We'll have to wait for the results of more experiments to see who may be right.

[Byblos]

Very interesting article on the new age of the universe as measured by the movements of distant stars (about 15 billion years and 180 billion lightyears wide).

http://news.yahoo.com/s/space/20060807/ ... anexpected

From the article:

A new way to measure distance
The new method took 10 years to develop and relied on optical and infrared measurements gathered from telescopes all around the world. The researchers looked at a binary star system in M33 where the stars eclipsed each other every five days. Unlike single stars, the masses of paired stars can be precisely calculated based on their movements. With knowledge of the stars' masses, the researchers could calculate their true luminosities, or how bright they would appear if they were nearby.

The difference between the true luminosity and the observed luminosity gives the distance between the stars and Earth. The team's results suggested that the stars were about 3 million light-years from Earth--or about half-a-million light-years farther than would be expected using the commonly accepted Hubble constant value.