In the Discover magazine article "Why Does Gravity Travel at the Speed of Light?" (Link below) Eric Betz holds that the picture is quite simple....
"...The speed of gravity is just the speed of information" no more, no less. To me this seems not so definite because you may remember Einstein never actually defined what information or a signal is or was!
This doesn't look as good for relativity to me at least about the speed of gravity if we look at the definition of what information or signal really are.
In the information math there has been much debate about what the definition of information is.
People have debated so much in information science that they haven't agreed and there have been more than 70 basic definitions attempted to nail down what information is. "What is this stuff.." Right!
Relativity and action reaction events seem to be more the basis of much and as a physicist at any rate, I would believe right at the foundation of energy conservation or relativity we're going to find something that's more solid than most definitions of something like "even yes, right, wisdom.."
So here's my definition of information or a signal;
... "change in one place that can be correlated with a change in another place and with energy or mass exchange between those two changes to mediate the exchange"..
As I want to say here if this turns out to be the fundamental definition of information I think this may be of value about connectivity.
I think it's not easy to put any kind of speed on information with all of the speeds around us of information! Matter and energy on the other hand move in regular ways..
As in the collapse of the wave function or about the speed of gravity to save Relativity, some believe in information as something that doesn't travel between bodies or events. This way it can travel at any speed and allows the speed of light or gravity to fit right in because we don't know what else it could be and only because of that.
This is the same idea used by some to describe the speed of the collapse of the wave function. "It's a black box, because we can't see inside yet which we don't yet know it must be at the speed if light because of Relativity which we do know."
In the history of science, there are black box after black box being lit up, as science has gotten, brighter! Because it might be like Relativity doesn't mean it is..
I believe Einstein was so concerned about the speed of wave function events because he knew intuitively that matter is being moved from one point to another in the collapse of the wave function, at faster than light. By my definition of information and a signal there's a connection between them and not just information which seems to like it hasn't got much physical meaning and if I were Einstein and believed in relativity so much I would have been a bit concerned too.
Perhaps for just a moment in all the hustle around him he might have remembered back to when he was thinking about that idea about information and a signal and in his elation about relativity he may have forgotten that there are other truths than employees because there are employers not just employees and the moon does full at a different rate around the Earth than the Earth around the Moon and there are privileged observers part of the time that are common.
All known fundamental interactions are mediated by the exchange of an intermediate boson. None are added on with the more slippery idea of those 70 or so other definitions of information.
This is why this one simple definition may narrow down all the other definitions. They may be only derived from this based on energy conservation or action reaction events in physics not math or information (as if it exists without a basis). As you may know in the history of science and math, great math has only followed great science like physics most of the time, not the other way around. This and the foundation of Relativity and energy conservation as far as it goes is why I believe my definition of a signal is the most basic and improved over Einstein's.
With my definition of information and a signal, gravity can't be forced to fit the speed of light necessarily because other definitions of information say nothing about the speed, and of course if we use this definition of information which may be the most important one Einstein didn't define, there's always an exchange of mass or energy between the two bodies or events the information travels between.
And if we accept force as an exchange of energy not just information, all energy has a speed and I think the speed of gravity as I say elsewhere not inertia may be faster than light.
This is because when we start looking at the force between masses different force always has a change of speed. And if gravity has a much reduced force it might have a much higher speed even while as I say LIGO may have found merely the speed of inertia.
This is why I think of Einstein's lack of definition of what a signal or information is was perhaps not even coincidental.
There are a few historic events where Newton actually lied about the evidence he was boosting to get people to believe what he was saying and Einstein was aware before he was making his discovery about the shift of the perihelion of Mercury that the shift to the perihelion of Venus was 5 times retrograde. It's been said that he deliberately downplayed the evidence about this just because he couldn't believe it was real.
So I even think it's possible his omission about defining a signal or information might have even been deliberate. I would think as smart as he was he was probably able to reach this definition more than once as he considered it.
(The idea that the shift of the perihelion of mercury may only be by way of impactors n the early history of our solar system is testable by other solar systems and we can find out if they all have a shift to the perihelion like Venus to the minus or if there is indeed some residual effect left like about the shift of the perihelion of Mercury.)
When you start to look at something definite like signals sending the information you get a different kind of idea of connection. The fields are no longer empty as Einstein believed.
When the fields are connected as needed by energy conservation they have tension like waves as Maxwell believed to find the speed of light exactly. And waves with different tensions have different speeds, all the speeds that are possible.
In my belief you can see the heavy quanta but the waves between them may be much faster than light but they're also much lighter than light so they're difficult to find.
Even if these waves don't turn out to be faster than light I think they really may be the solution about dark matter. Dark matter may be the perfect way to connect up the events of relativity by way of the low energy dark matter field.
As I say elsewhere on some of my recent posts my belief is that above a certain density as in a singularity gravity may become so strong that it removes its own field lines, or at any rate the dense quanta that are created there that we find all around (by way of radiation outward from the superluminary jets). These become strong enough by Line Removal that gravity or anything like dark matter may essentially be invisible to the chemical events or things like electrical conductivity of the other fields.
Remember that dark matter is believed to make up 4/5 of all the mass of the universe by different lines of research going back to the 1930s. At first appearance it might seem that Maxwell's low energy field would just connect up as usual and we can find lots of easy evidence for the waves. But so far- nothing has been seen of dark matter!
On the other hand this type of phase change combined with line removal could explain what dark matter is, how energy is conserved for Maxwell's fields and not Einstein's and why the singularity doesn't become infinite for different black holes of different mass or different radii since infinity equals infinity.
Gravity like dark matter doesn't shield and Line Removal and the phase change with the superluminal ability to change speed and phase may be why. If the Dark Matter makes up 4/5 of the mass of the Earth by this method where would it be? I think it may be both flowing in and out with only the much smaller net force we see on the mass around us.
And no doubt moving masses, big and small with the same force would move at different speeds because the larger mass has more area in contact with the external waves and so it moves slower with the same force applied. Or about the distinction of center of mass and center of gravity for bodies in motion often seen. It's a field with tension and gravity is not the same as the higher energy com of inertia even while both have resilience.
All this would explain what dark matter is, and why it's so tough to find and also why when you change the light or boson between two heavy quanta they both change because they're connected unlike what Einstein tells us about how there's nothing connecting them. The waves of light.. with all the experiments that prove they exist I haven't doubted them so much..
Special Relativity is a great idea and has been a real inspiration to me but ultimately I believe it's missing some important things that are we see all around us all the time, like when you move around the room what waves are exerting on you as you go through your swim moves..
I believe dark matter may bend light and not other matter because it's not mere gravity as some believe but also because light unlike the heavier quanta being a boson would spin at the speed of light all the way to the center and those doesn't have much Line Removal. So as I say on some of my recent posts heavier quanta such as electrons pions or electromagnetic fields have Line Removal and in this scenario they act like they're not only inert to chemical or mechanical forces etc. but they also have internal gyroscopes to resist change more than the light. Since at high energy, light behaves like a heavy quanta when it converts over to an electron or a muon it has a change in the speed of its collapse of the wave function to faster than light inside explaining otherwise the unexplained problem of "why the muon weighs". More importantly it would now have line removal. And if light is bent differently at high energy than low energy by gravity, it's no longer a simple empty field the same as light as Einstein believed.
Go Here for the Article about This https://www.discovermagazine.com/the-sciences/why-does-gravity-travel-at-the-speed-of-light
