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Does gravity travel, or does it exist everywhere all at once?

A deep-dive article by Michael Alan Prestwood.

First, the key idea of the article:

When thinking about the speed of light, remember that gravity never waits. Light can be delayed by matter, but gravity propagates freely through spacetime.

The core takeaway concept is this:

Gravity doesn’t travel; it’s a curvature of spacetime that’s everywhere all at once. However, its effects, like photons of light ripple out like a wave. You can think of it as part of the fabric of spacetime, which is comprised of four fundamental things: gravity, two fields (electromagnetic and Higgs), and a vacuum. While the speculative graviton particle has yet to be found or proven, the others have known carrier particles: photons for the electromagnetic force, W and Z bosons for the weak nuclear force, gluons for the strong nuclear force, and the Higgs boson for the Higgs field.

Now, the article.

Does gravity travel, or does it exist everywhere all at once?

Light takes eight minutes to travel from the Sun to Earth, does gravity? No, but it’s a bit more complicated than that. To keep it simple, let’s use light to describe what we know.

While light does travel, gravity exists everywhere, all at once as part of the fabric of the universe. That’s what Einstein figured out. Now, if the Sun disappeared, would we feel the effects of that gravity instantly? And then eight minutes later see the Sun disappear? Before Einstein, the answer was yes! Newton described gravity as a force that acts on objects with mass instantaneously.

Einstein showed “the effects” of gravity also travel at the speed of light. So, that “yes” answer went to “no.” So, if the Sun disappeared, we would see and feel the effects eight minutes later.

Einstein’s General Relativity says that thinking of gravity as “traveling instantly” was the wrong way to think about it. In essence, he figured out that gravity is everywhere, all at once. As it changes, those effects change the fabric of spacetime, and those changes ripple out like a wave at the speed of light.

That Relativity FAQ,

was first published on TST 2 years ago.