The discussion centers around the concept of superluminal transfer of information via gravity, particularly in the context of whether the gravitational influence of the sun could be detected faster than the speed of light. Participants explore the implications of gravity's propagation speed and its effects on Earth’s motion and celestial observations.
Participants express differing views on the detectability of gravitational changes and the implications for scientific understanding. There is no consensus on whether the speed of gravity can be experimentally validated or the significance of the potential observations.
Participants reference the limitations of current astronomical measurements and the challenges associated with detecting small positional changes in celestial bodies. The discussion also highlights the dependence on definitions of measurement accuracy and the assumptions underlying the arguments presented.
In 8 minutes the Earth would be less than 700 meters out of place. Do you really think we could detect that small an error in the star positions in less than 8 minutes? I don't.crapola77 said:star positions, communications satellites breakdowns
Huh? That's just a big load of crapola. The largest stellar parallax we can see is about 3/4 of an arcsec over the course of a year. We certainly wouldn't be able to detect it to as we moved out of position 700m! (That would imply we could measure it on a minute-to-minute basis, as the Earth rotates fast enough for a 700m shift in a minute at moderate latitude.crapola77 said:if one were looking for it yes, it would be a sad indication of mans scientific achevment of we couldn't considering star positions have been one of the strongest underlying themes in all of science reaching as far back the first humans, if we can't predict with a high degree of accuracy the path of the Earth's orbit and when its no longer obeying laws by which we predict its orbit then I suggest the hope for the discovery of a fundamental theory of the universe is far beyond our scope...