Almost 100 years after Einstein presented the general theory of relativity in a Berlin lecture theatre, the quest to spot the gravitational waves he predicted may be entering its final stages.
I am betting against finding them. I have long had the (poorly founded) notion that gravitational information propagates instantaneously, and thus, makes no waves. My guess is that gravitation is a quantum condensation process whereby space between masses decreases as a function of time. Basically, to the extent that one mass is indistinguishable to another, it is more likely to be found in the direction of the other mass. That is, its position wave-function is skewed by another mass by a degree of indistinguishability.
If gravity is instantaneous, it could theoretically be used for faster-than-light communication, travel, and I think causality violations. General relativity depends heavily on the speed of gravity not exceeding C, so it would have to be essentially rewritten. Relevant: https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/26742/does-gravity-travel-at-the-speed-of-light As an engineer, I kind of hope gravity is instantaneous. But I doubt it. Reminds me of Time for the Stars, in which telepathy is found to exist, and be instantaneous, and is used for communication at near-light speeds, eventually being the foundation of FTL. Good story.The rate of orbital decay of binary pulsars is, among other factors, dependent on the speed of gravity. The in-spiral rate of one binary pulsar system has been measured and found to agree with the rate predicted by general relativity to within a 0.2% margin of error.
Yes, I am a stubborn contrarian here. It's probably hope motivtated as well. I do wonder what the orbital decay of these stars would look like with instantaneous gravity. There is such a thing as instananeous information transmission, of course. It just must reside within a quantum system, and theoretically can't be made useful without.