Arguments on the Speed of Gravity
First Letter from µmike to Virginia Trimble
Dr. Virginia Trimble
Department of Physics
University of California
Irvine, CA
Dear Dr. Trimble,
I attended your lecture at Los Alamos, New Mexico. I had read about your open mind and how you liked to help the “underdog.” I think you did a good job of presenting “modern” cosmology, as it has developed over the last century. However, as I said at the reception, there are a number of problems with the assumptions and logic of a single big bang model.
The newspaper did not publish the letter to the editor that I have included. But it really doesn’t matter to me since I search only for the truth and you know the truth of your heart and of the situation. If you really care about science, then you must address the questions I have posed to you, because they are honest questions of science. I believe that future history is looking over your shoulder. Few people have a chance to influence what later will be recorded about their lives; but you have such an opportunity.
I still hope that we can be friends, even though you don’t seem to have the most basic of respect for other Earth humans. I too am old, but I was taught to always respect others and care about their existence. It hurt me greatly to realize that you care nothing for my existence or me. I don’t see why we can’t agree to disagree without being disagreeable. As a philosopher, I constantly face new and challenging ideas, so I often disagree with others I meet. But I try to treat each person as important and I do care for his or her existence, as required when one desires a spiritual life. The true essence of love is to love those that are different from ourselves.
My further hope is that you will examine the questions that I ask and seek to understand the assumptions that are leading mankind astray in his search for a unification of the forces of nature. If you get through the five questions that I’ve asked, then I have plenty more.
Your friend,
µmike
PS a NASA scientist once wrote me back that he wasn’t my friend. I wrote him back and said that is fine, you do not have to be a friend of mine. But on the other hand, you cannot keep me from being your friend, since my feelings are up to me. Therefore, whether you like it or not, I will always attempt to be your friend and treat you in the manner that is consistent with being your friend.
Letter to the Editor:
Dear Editor,
On Monday I attended the lecture given by Dr. Virginia Trimble, which was sponsored by The J. Robert Oppenheimer Memorial Committee. I was very concerned to find that no questions could be asked, since many of the statements made by Dr. Trimble were apparently false. An announcement was made that questions could be asked at the reception that followed the speech, except when I tried to ask a question on cosmology, I was presented with Dr. Trimble’s back side as she walked away. If the essence of science is to be preserved, then those that call themselves scientist should be ready and able to answer any and all questions posed to them in their field of expertise.
Since I could not ask my questions at the event to Dr. Trimble herself, I would like to pose them here.
1) How can you describe the single big bang model as a scientific model, since it begins by saying that something comes from nothing? If I were to present a model stating that a tea cup of gold could be made from nothing, I would be laughed out of the room by most scientists. Yet Dr. Trimble would have us believe that EVERYTHING that ever existed came from nothing, and no one even smiled. I will continue to ask what came before their single big bang and what is beyond the edge of “the universe” as they have defined it?
2) What speed of gravity are you using in your single big bang model? In modern science, we apparently have a great deal of confusion over the speed of the gravitational system. Most physical scientists believe that the speed of gravity is the same as the speed of light, or C. Most cosmologist assume the speed of gravity is infinite, since that is the only way we could have a single expanding or contracting universe. Tom Van Flandern has proposed that the speed of gravity is CX10^10 while I have proposed that the speed of gravity is C^2. Dr. Trimble apparently believes that the speed of gravity is the same as the speed of light, but any limit to the speed and affect of gravity means that the single big bang model is impossible, since all parts of the cosmos can’t possibly know about each other, “at the same time.” I have proposed that big bangs come from black holes that have grown too large to hold their energy and they redistribute this energy via a big bang event to make nature’s largest cycle.
3) How can you have an “universe” that is only 10 to 20 billion years old, when some stars (red dwarfs) are now thought to have a life time of 1,000 billion years? There has not been enough time in 20 billion years to even make the higher elements in our own bodies. Our bodies and solar system are rich in all the elements, including all of the higher natural elements. This means this material has to have been through numerous star systems for the elements to be made. Under the single big bang model, the first stars would have to be hydrogen to helium stars and then later generations of stars would make the higher elements, some of which can only be made in super nova explosions, as described in Dr. Trimble’s lecture. Since the life of stars range from a few million years to billions of years, there is not enough time in 10 to 20 billion years to include all the generations of stars necessary to make the materials of our own bodies. During a ride on the Toltec and Cumbres Railroad, one passes a granite outcrop that is said to be 3.5 billion years old. How can this represent 1/5 of everything that ever existed? Also, when we view galaxies that are supposedly at the “edge” of the cosmos, we see fully formed galaxies that were trillions of years old when the light left them 15 billion years ago. I believe that it is impossible for the cosmos to only be 15 billion years old as I suspect it is infinite in age and size.
4) Does the single big bang model represent a finite cosmos? Under this model, there is a single event, which occurred a finite time ago, with a finite expansion rate and an edge by all accounts. Logically, this would imply a finite cosmos, since these criterion would represent a closed set and all closed sets are finite. I believe we live in an infinite cosmos and the empirical evidence supports my contention. The farther we look out into the cosmos, the more fully formed galaxies we see. There may be an end to what we can see, but there is probably no end to the cosmos. It is much better that we teach our children that they are born into an infinite cosmos and therefore the only limits imposed upon them are the limits they allow within their own minds.
5) Wouldn’t a single big bang model violate the very principles of relativity? Relativity clearly states that there is no preferred frame of reference for any physical system. A single big bang model implies a single and preferred frame of reference from the event itself. Thus, relativity and a single big bang model are at odds and cannot coexist in a coherent scientific system.
Since I have been in Los Alamos (more than a year) the Los Alamos Monitor has spent more time examining the evidence of Martian origin of the Frass Meteorite than all the scientists at the lab combined. It seems to me that all the excitement and wonder has been removed from science and that most scientist are more concerned with their careers and politics than actually discovering the truths that exist within nature.
I will make a standing proposal to debate Dr. Trimble or any others that support the single big bang model in any open public forum at any time. Dr. Trimble has now been inducted into two of my organizations. First she has been included in “The Flat Universe Society,” dedicated to all those persons who believe in the single big bang model and its inherent edge. Second, she has been inducted into “Galileo’s Gatekeepers,” dedicated to all those that would stand at Galileo’s gate and keep his truths from being heard. These issues of cosmology and science are too important to ignore and I would hope there are some interested scientists who still have open minds that are willing to talk about these issues of cosmology and science.
Mike Moore
181 Central Park Square
Los Alamos, NM 87544
505 662-5851
Picture of letter from Virginia to µmike:
Text of this letter:
Thank you for your letter (which was forwarded to me here at U. Maryland). Probably nothing I would write is going to affect your views so I will comment only on one very particularly straightforward issue - the speed of gravity. Newtonian gravitation is a1/r2 force (and all efforts to find deviations from this at any scale except those predicted by general relativity have resulted in upper limits only). This means, especially at large distances, that gravity must carried by a zero-rest-mass particle (called the graviton), so that gravitational information is propagated at the same speed as electromagnetic information.
Actually there is a fairly direct observational measurement of this speed for gravitational information. When you derive the expression for the rate of the advance of the perihelion of Mercury from the Einstein-Hilbert equations, the speed of propagation of gravitational information enters to the fifth power or some such. Thus, when you measure this advance (the famous 43” per century), you are measuring the “speed of gravity”, and indeed it is the same as the speed of light.
µmike’s answer:
Dear Virginia,
Thank you for taking the time to write me. I know it is easier to ignore someone, rather than taking the time to deal with them. My respect for you has grown since I received your answer.
I know from your body language that I hurt you when I spoke to you, yet I had no intention of hurting you, only of trying to start a conversation that I think is desperately needed within science. I sometimes don’t realize that not everyone enjoys a discussion of new perspectives as much as I do, and in some ways, each human being is as complicated as the rest of the cosmos combined. I apologize if I hurt you and I ask only to be allowed to make scientific and logical arguments concerning the philosophy of space and time.
I don’t think your reported experiment actually measures the updating of the gravitational system, but rather the energies moving through the system. Let’s suppose for a moment that the speed of the gravitational system is the same as the speed of light.
First of all, one would have to completely throw out the single big bang model, with its expanding or contracting single universe. Everyone admits that light takes 15 billion years to get from the most distant known galaxies to our own, yet if gravity were that slow, then any information about our system’s gravitational changes would take 15 billion years to reach those far distances. Imagine if the information about our gravitational system left the sun now and it took 15 billion years to be registered at those distant places. In that amount of time, our sun would explode and not even be around, once its “old” gravitational information reached those furthest stars. Thus, their could be no relationship between these distant objects as far as expansion or contraction, since the speed of update of the gravitational system would limit these types of relationships to much smaller areas of space, say a galaxy or galaxy cluster.
Let’s take another example. The Earth is in orbit around the sun. Suppose the sun explodes. If you are correct, then the Earth would orbit “nothing” for 8 or 9 minutes, as it waited for the gravitational information to reach the Earth, so it could “know” when to fly off into space. If we examine this situation philosophically, we see that before the event, all of the mass within the sun is cooperating to form a very large space around the sun, which includes the Earth in orbit. But as the explosion takes place, much smaller groups of mass are disassociated from the parent body and now must form their own space, which in many instances, would not include Earth. Intuitively, this space must form faster than the things that are moving through it. It is common sense that the Earth would leave orbit “instantaneously” upon the dissolution of the sun’s gravitational influence. Of course, I predict the gravitational system would be updated at C2 and thus the Earth would “know” the sun exploded shortly after the event and much quicker than the time it takes light to travel the same distance.
Another example would be the new “moon” of the Earth. Apparently Apollo 12 left a Saturn 3rd stage in orbit about the Earth. A number of years ago, this object passed through a LaGrange point and moved from Earth orbit into a solar orbit. Then, last year, it again went through this portal and reentered Earth orbit. Apparently in a few years, the satellite will again pass through this point and return to solar orbit. As it is approaching this region in the future, it must come to the point that the two bodies gravity (Earth’s and the sun’s) must measure each other to determine who “gets” the satellite. If the gravitational information were only updated at the speed of light, then the sun would not know the object was at the LaGrange point until 8 minutes after the object had passed that point. Thus the sun would never be able to capture the satellite. There must be a more instantaneous updating of the gravitational system, for objects to make “instantaneous” decisions about orbital dymamics.
Tom Van Flandern has also done work on this subject. He thinks that the gravitational system updates at faster than CX1010. He has provided logic and evidence at his site that I think are valid. You can link to it at http://www.metaresearch.org/, but please pay particular attention to http://www.metaresearch.org/cosmology/speed_of_gravity.asp and to http://www.metaresearch.org/home/Viewpoint/Kopeikin.asp. I don’t agree with everything that Tom says, but on the other hand, he apparently has done more thinking about the speed of gravity than anyone but me. I would hope from his articles, you might realize the empirical evidence alone indicates that gravity propagates faster than light. And remember, the current single big bang model requires that the speed of gravity be infinite. That is the only way that all of the mass of the cosmos could “know” about all the other mass “at the same time.”
The confusion about this entire subject comes because mankind has no problem in imagining a giant Euclidean coordinate system superimposed on all that we can see. Mankind never takes into account the speed of the formation of the coordinate system, because his coordinate system is always created at an infinite speed in relation to the problem being solved by the equations. Also, mankind can create an imaginary single coordinate system to encompass everything. Nature does not have this advantage and must form its coordinate system as it goes, outward from each real physical system. Because we can imagine a single coordinate system does not mean that Nature abides by the same rules.
Long ago, Einstein told us that every gravitational viewpoint was relative and valid. Why is this true? There is no preferred frame of reference because each real physical system must build its own space (and therefore its own frame of reference) from the mass outward. Each physical system has its own limits in the amount of space that it can define and apparently the limits of any particular system would be in the size range of galaxy clusters. Mass within these systems are always contracting inward and eventually adding to the mass and therefore the space created by the black holes at the center of these large structures. Thus the largest structures within nature that could be defined by a single Euclidean coordinate system would probably be galaxy clusters. Every equation that purports to define reality must include the formation of the gravitational system (nature’s coordinate system) at C2, if it is to exactly represent nature.
If we take the example of the Saturn 3rd stage, mankind would solve the orbital equations by imagining a giant Euclidean coordinate system. He could place the center at the center of the sun, the Earth, or the satellite and solve his problem concerning the orbital predictions of the mathematics. But please realize, that when mankind does this, he never considers the speed of the coordinate system. It is always placed in the problem before the mathematics take place and there never is an equation showing the “speed” of the coordinate system, since man has always assumed that the speed of the coordinate system is infinite in relation to the problem. Nature doesn’t have this luxury.
Now let’s take a look a several situations where “something” is going faster than the speed of light. The first instance comes from classic electronics. I was taught that once a circuit is “turned on,” the circuit “knew” of the potential difference instantaneously and then the energies flowed at or below the speed of light. In all electronic circuits, how do the electrons know where to flow? The potential difference must propagate the entire system at a speed that is faster than anything that might move through the system, otherwise electrons would not know where to go when faced with the many branches of a common electronic circuit. I was also taught that when electromagnetic radiation is created at an antenna that a gravity wave propagates from the antenna slightly ahead of the radiation and at the speed of light. This represents a basic contradiction within classical electronics, since the gravitational system updates the potential difference at an infinite speed, yet the gravity of radiation only updates at the speed of light. Under my model of gravitational systems, both systems are updated at C2, and there is no contradiction.
Next look at the number of experiments where information is being exchanged faster than the speed of light. Entangled particles communicate at a speed that is faster than the speed of light. This is the essence of all quantum events and is how particles can appear to be in two places at the same time, since the energy of the gravitational system must update faster than anything that moves within the system. Once one side of the entangled pair is “touched” by outside energy the energy of the system updates the other half at the speed of gravity and it appears as magic to the C world. The “entanglement” is purely gravitational since the connections of gravity (all bonds) are the way that nature keeps track of the things that exist. All of the connections of gravity represent nature’s coordinate system and define all space that we can know.
You say that the gravitational system is updated by gravitons. Yet I would claim gravitons represents one of the few one-word oxymorons. J One cannot build a universe from just mass or particles. One must have connections of gravity to form the relationship between these masses. A perfect example is Tinker Toys. If you want to build something, you can’t just take hubs (mass) and make any real object. Likewise, you couldn’t just take the sticks (connections of gravity) and make anything. To make something real, you must have the hubs and the sticks, just as nature must have mass and the connections of gravity to make the structures we see around us.
Gravitons have never been observed by any experiment. Yet we know that bonds connect virtually every mass we can identify. All I am saying is that these bonds must all be a part of the gravitational system (http://www.micromike.com/deardasgupta.html) and the gravitational system (nature’s coordinate system) must update itself faster than anything that moves within the system. Instead of relying on gravitons, why don’t we consider gravions, which represent all the connections between all the masses?
You state in your letter that you could not change my mind. Yet my mind is perfectly open to logic and evidence from the real world. Anyone that has spent any time talking to me knows this to be true. I have to admit that I had already heard every argument you have presented, because I have studied these things intently for many years. But there always appeared to me to be basic flaws in the assumptions made by pregravionic science and that is why I looked for a better solution. Every bit of the gravionic model of physical systems has already been proven by experiments already conducted. I just make a different interpretation of the experiments as opposed to pregravionic scientist. I hope you will consider these issues, because I think it is impossible for the speed of gravity to be the same as the speed of light.
Your friend,
