Another Way of Looking at the Michelson-Morley Experimental Results

Gravity propagates through space at the same speed as light. If the sun were to suddenly magically disappear this instant, it would take 8 minutes for the absence of its gravity to be felt here on earth. If theory holds up, one day soon they'll even detect gravity waves. Anyway, the question is, what medium does gravity travel through?In other words, you've just replaced one problem with a nearly identical problem.--Percy

Hi Baloney,There's no need to title a message "Reply to so-and-so." The board software already keeps track of who you're replying to. You may have noticed the little "This message is a reply to" and "Replies to this message" links.It isn't clear how your reply is related to the topic. your position as stated in your Message 15 seems to be that you don't believe that electromagnetic waves can travel if unsupported by a medium. Your proposal is that gravity is the medium. I only pointed out that gravity also travels (at the speed of light, just like electromagnetic waves) and therefore requires a medium.If there really is any medium then it is the fabric of space/time, but it isn't a medium in the way that you would normally think of one.--Percy

Maybe. Maybe not. As I said in my Message 16 that posed the original question: So how does your theory hold up if gravity *is*, as suspected, a wave?Or, considering another possibility, the Higgs Boson is postulated as the particle which imparts mass to objects. How does gravity as the medium for electromagnetic waves hold up if mass is actually negotiated through exchanges of Higgs Bosons? Do photons of light ride on Higgs Bosons?At heart your feeling that electromagnetic waves require a medium to propagate is based upon analogy with sound and water waves. Your proposal doesn't take into account the dual wave/particle nature of electromagnetic radiation. Your analogy completely breaks down as gravity increases, since sound waves increase in observed speed as the density of the medium increases, while increasing gravity does not affect the speed of light at all. Perhaps your idea boils down to general relativity, which doesn't postulate a medium.The most important questions, of course, concern what evidence led you to your conclusions, and what testable predictions do your ideas have?--Percy

It's fine if you're just throwing ideas out there to see if anyone like them, but if you want to persuade other people then you need to explain how you arrived at your conclusions from the available evidence and current theoretical knowledge.Look at this way. Say I liked your idea and wanted to convince other people over to it. How would I do that if I had no idea how you arrived at your conclusions? If someone asked me, "What makes you think so?", what would I say?--Percy

How do you validate that it actually was eureka?--Percy

Thanks for the story, I'll give it a read when I have some time. My focus is kind of narrow in this thread, primarily any substantiating evidence or argument for your gravity-as-medium proposal that you might have.--Percy

Any two dimensional spherical surface increases in area proportional to the square of the distance from the origin. It could not be any other way.Can you think of any test for your idea? For example, what do you think would happen to light equidistant between two equal masses at the point where gravity cancels out? There are probably any number of other tests you could think up, including a vast number involving relativistic effects that would affect light differently since gravity's effect on light must be different from it's effect on matter, since in current theory light and matter are influenced by gravity in the same way, while in your theory matter is influenced by gravity while for light gravity is the medium.And here's a sort of meta-issue to think about. If you're right, then scientists have missed the most simple and obvious of answers for well over a hundred years.--Percy

As a spacecraft departs earth and approaches more and more closely to the moon, doesn't the gravitational attraction of the earth diminish and that of the moon increase?Have you ever heard of LaGrange Points? Where precisely enough gravity from two orbiting bodies cancels out to provide enough centripetal force for a third body of negligible mass to remain in a fixed position relative to the larger bodies?In other words, your statement that gravity doesn't cancel is contradicted by reality. As your distance r from a body increases, the gravitational force exerted by that body diminishes proportional to the square of r. F is not a constant. Once again your statements are not consistent with reality. This is the formula for finding the gravitational attraction between two bodies given their masses and the distance between their centers of mass. It's an approximation that assumes the bodies are perfectly spherical (usually a very safe assumption with planets given their fairly close approximation of sphericity and their great distance from one another), and it ignores relativistic effects, also usually a very safe assumption. I mention this not to call the equation into question, but to point out your error is reasoning in the wrong direction. You're taking a model of reality, the equation, and using it to reason back to the way reality must be. Since the model is only an approximation of reality, reasoning in this way will likely lead you to error. You must instead reason from reality back toward formulation of a model.There *is* such a thing as a gravitational field. Light passing through a gravitational field is bent by it. Light has no mass, by the way.--Percy