MSNBC report on a fascinating experiment scheduled for this Sunday to measure the speed of gravity. Writes Alan Boyle, of MSNBC’s “Cosmic Log”:
How fast is gravity? The question seems so simple, but it actually generates a cosmic debate inside and outside the scientific mainstream. This weekend, astronomers will take a big step toward calculating the speed of gravity.
Relativity theory dictates that nothing can travel faster than the speed of light, and that such a cosmic speed limit would apply to gravitational influences as well. But there’s never been a definitive experimental test of that claim.
As it so happens, a line-of-sight encounter between Jupiter and a distant quasar at 12:30 p.m. ET Sunday represents the best opportunity in a decade for such a test, according to Sergei Kopeikin of the University of Missouri at Columbia and Ed Fomalont of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory.
The astronomers expect their data to confirm that gravitational effects move at the speed of light — and they hope to have the results ready to present to the American Astronomical Society in January. But if they come up with an unexpected answer, it could send shock waves through the scientific community and beyond. […]
There are other facets to the “speed of gravity” debate that may not be settled even if Kopeikin and Fomalont come up with the expected results. Iconoclastic physicist Tom Van Flandern has been saying for years that gravitational force acts at velocities far faster than the speed of light, and he engaged Kopeikin in a rather technical discussion of the quasar experiment. Suffice it to say that Van Flandern thinks this weekend’s observations won’t address his central claims.
This whole exercise isn’t merely a dry classroom debate over Lorentzian vs. Einsteinian relativity: Any evidence that gravity works faster than the speed of light would be seized upon by creationists to bolster their claim that the universe really could have been created 6,000 years ago. We saw this debate flare up in the wake of suggestions that the speed of light might have been faster in the distant past.
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