Runaway pulsar has astronomers scratching their heads

[Hermit]

I think I see why the forum has been slowly becoming less fun over the years. So many discussions become ego-fuelled, one-upsmanship challenges rather than collaborative efforts at fostering each others' understanding.

Are you implying that there were fewer ego-fuelled, one-upsmanship challenges circa 2010? I don't want you to answer that here. Perhaps you might want to move your post and my reply to a more appropriate thread. Maybe this one.

[pErvinalia]

Why don't you remove whatever fucking stick you've got up your bunghole instead?

[FBM]

I think I'll just leave everything where it is. Ponder it or don't at your discretion.

[Calilasseia]

The Zhu paper on measurement of gravitational speed can be read in full here.

[pErvinalia]

The wiki article is hard enough going for me. I don't think I could handle the source..

[FBM]

The Zhu paper on measurement of gravitational speed can be read in full here.

Huh. OK, this is going to take some time.

[Rum]

Well that was interesting. Understood it all..except the funny squiggly bits - maffs I think they are called..

[cronus]

Gotta feeling about this....could be a new kind of Higgs-Boson in this somewhere.

[mistermack]

Well that was interesting. Understood it all..except the funny squiggly bits - maffs I think they are called..

Depends where you're from.
Some people think there is only one maff.

The speed of gravity being c is old news, I thought.

It can only be that c is a fundamental property of spacetime, not just of light, or gravity, or anything else.

[JimC]

Not true...as usual.

Expert on these things Rum? You seem to know a lot more than the average Joe.

Well, in the sense that you were implying that the pulsar was moving faster than 300,000,000 m/s, he was absolutely correct!

[Rum]

I don't seem to be able to go metric with C. For me it will always be 186,000 mps!

[cronus]

I don't seem to be able to go metric with C. For me it will always be 186,000 mps!

You read it in a book and took it as a speed limit in the human sense. You've got your own brain Rum. Science isn't a legal framework. New evidence overturns the old. That's what happens.

[JimC]

I don't seem to be able to go metric with C. For me it will always be 186,000 mps!

You read it in a book and took it as a speed limit in the human sense. You've got your own brain Rum. Science isn't a legal framework. New evidence overturns the old. That's what happens.

Show me the evidence of a material object exceeding the speed of light...

[mistermack]

To me, the speed of light is like the shortest distance.

If you want to go from Gloucester to London, it's 100 miles in a straight line.
You can make it as long as you like, by taking detours.
But you can't make it any shorter.
So imagine a loud clap of thunder goes off in Gloucester. The sound can reach London in a straight line, or reflected off the Cotswold hills, or various other routes.
The limit of the fastest travel possible is a straight line to London. The sound can travel slower, but it can't go any faster than the straight route.
So when we hear thunder, the very first sound you hear has come in a straight line, and the rest of the rumbling is due to reflections, taking a longer route.

Same with moving through space. You can go as slow as you like, right down to stationary.
But you cant go any faster than c. C is analagous to the speed of sound.

So unless you can find a new component of spacetime, that isn't related to energy or matter, you'll never send information faster than c.

Of course, if there was something unrelated to matter and energy, that could convey information faster than c, you wouldn't be able to detect it anyway.

[pErvinalia]

But information IS sent faster than c in quantum entanglement.