duh
"van flanderns ideas are not widely accepted"...neither were Debroglies, in fact, they didnt accept his ideas as a phd thesis.
" ...belive that Van Flandern has actually been published, so that while his ideas may be full of errors and far away from the mainstream..."
State the "errors" and give refuting arguments...I have found none...science is not about making claims like this without backing them up, leave that to politics.
sheesh, get back to basics guys.
THERE IS NO DELAY (NO "SPEED" OF GRAVITY, IT IS INSTANTANEOUS)...SIMPLE EXPERIMENTS HAVE SHOWN THIS; AND CONSERVATION OF ANGULAR MOMENTUM PROVES THIS.
If it were not so, orbits would not be stable, the Earth is NOT attracted to the point where the sun USED to be, (the spot where light tells us it now is).
Also, the GR description of gravity assumes a force which is not explained, the ball on the trampoline will go nowhere without it.
"...Yet, anyone with a computer and orbit computation or numerical integration software can verify the consequences of introducing a delay into gravitational interactions. The effect on computed orbits is usually disastrous because conservation of angular momentum is destroyed. Expressed less technically by Sir Arthur Eddington, this means: ÒIf the Sun attracts Jupiter towards its present position S, and Jupiter attracts the Sun towards its present position J, the two forces are in the same line and balance. But if the Sun attracts Jupiter toward its previous position SÕ, and Jupiter attracts the Sun towards its previous position JÕ, when the force of attraction started out to cross the gulf, then the two forces give a couple. This couple will tend to increase the angular momentum of the system, and, acting cumulatively, will soon cause an appreciable change of period, disagreeing with observations if the speed is at all comparable with that of light.Ó (Eddington, 1920, p. 94) See Figure 1.
Understanding the very meaning of the “speed of gravity” requires resolving any confusion that may remain between these two unrelated concepts. The “speed of gravity” refers to whatever causally links the source of gravity to the 3-space acceleration of a target body. Dividing the distance between a source of gravity and a target body by the “speed of gravity” answers the question: “If a source of gravity accelerates, how much time will elapse before the target body responds?” In Figure 3 and Table I of our previous paper [1], we showed this is much less than the light-time between the two bodies in the case of binary pulsars. Further points relevant to electrodynamic analogies and retarded potentials raised by Marsch & Nissim-Sabat [+12] and Ibison et al. [+13] were already answered by this author. [+14] In brief, retarded potentials omit transverse aberration, the largest physical manifestation of propagation delay, and therefore cannot address questions of interest here. We will elaborate in the next section.
S. Carlip has now also commented on our previous paper. [+15] Carlip argues for the consistency of some of these experiments with the geometric interpretation of general relativity, assuming that gravity propagates at lightspeed. However, neither experiment (5) or (6) on the above list (if independently verified) is consistent with the geometric or lightspeed interpretations of GR, although they are consistent with the field interpretation of the same equations in flat space-time. [+16,+17] In brief, Carlip (following recent practice) repeatedly blurs the distinction between changes in gravitational fields and gravitational waves, thereby arriving at conclusions applicable only to the latter, but claiming they also apply to the former.
http://www.ldolphin.org/vanFlandern/gravityspeed.html
http://metaresearch.org/cosmology/gravity/speed_limit.asp
