Graviton Questions: How Do Gravitons Pass Through Objects?

[fbsthreads]

Say a penny is falling to Earth from a height,
Gravitons shoot up from the earth’s surface grabbing the penny and pulling it down to earth.
Fair enough.

Now imagine that directly above that penny is another penny, also falling to earth, the gravitons pulling at this second penny must have passed through the first penny to get to it.

So my question is, when gravitons have pulled something towards earth, how are they then able to pass through that object and go on to act upon other objects, in exactly the same way without losing any energy?

cheers.

 

[Janitor]

One of the nice things about the classical-field point of view (Einstein's) of gravity, which ignores the graviton idea, is that gravity is a curving of spacetime. In the realm of classical G.R., there can therefore obviously be no shielding effect. In fact, the upper penny inhabits a region of spacetime that is ever-so-slightly more curved than it would have been if the lower penny were not there.

When you start talking about virtual gravitons acting in a flat space background, I have no intuition whatsoever about how things work.

 

[Chen]

(I really have no idea about gravitons but I'm going to make a guess here.)

If you think the gravitons have a finite amount of energy, since you asked "how are they then able to pass through that object ... without losing any energy", where does that energy come from? We know for a fact that gravitational force acting between any two masses is continuous, so we can assume that each mass in this universe is "spreading" gravitons all the time, for infinitely long time. So where does the energy of the gravitons come from?

 

[Nereid]

Other than that there's no repulsive equivalent, how is this situation different from one involving charged objects (and photons)?