Breaking the Speed Limit

<BLOCKQUOTE id=quote><font size=2 face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" id=quote>quote:<hr height=1 noshade id=quote>[Vaughn]: "If a charged particle or a gravitating mass suddenly accelerates, the change in the electric or gravitational field propagates outward at the speed of light." Is this true? Has this been shown?<hr height=1 noshade id=quote></BLOCKQUOTE id=quote></font id=quote><font face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" size=2 id=quote>

This claim is not true, although it is widely believed by relativists. In the case of gravity, both the binary pulsar and the Walker-Dual experiments show an opposite result (that even accelerations of sources show no detectible propagation delay as slow as lightspeed). For electrodynamics, the Sherwin-Rawcliffe experiment shows the equivalent result. Further information and citations can be found in the two "speed of gravity" papers posted on this web site, "Cosmology" tab, "Gravity" sub-tab. -|Tom|-

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For electrodynamics, the Sherwin-Rawcliffe experiment shows the equivalent result.
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Tom, could you tell some more on that experiment, or just tell me what search engines to use? From what I found on those guys it seems they specialized in synthesized aperture antennae. I wonder if they used a phased array antenna in that experiment...

A whole lot of valuable science is not accessible on the Internet yet. Here is what I have on this experiment:

“Electromagnetic mass and the inertial properties of nuclei”, C.W. Sherwin and R.D. Rawcliffe, Report I-92 of March 14, 1960 of the Consolidated Science Laboratory, Univ. of Illinois, Urbana; obtainable from U.S. Department of Commerce’s Clearinghouse for Scientific and Technical Information, document AD 625706. See also the experiment description in <i>Heretical Verities</i>, T.E. Phipps, Jr., Classic Non-fiction Library, Urbana, pp. 273-282 (1986). Short summary: Charges accelerated jointly in the same direction respond to each other’s instantaneous positions, and not to the “left-behind potential hill” following acceleration from zero speed. -|Tom|-

Thanks anyway, Tom.
There's a question I always wanted to ask but never hoped to get answered - if the first-order electric and gravity fields appear to be instantaneous, why is there no experiments reported on instantaneous signalling? Coaxially oriented dipole antennae can sense no transverse radiation from each-other, just the variations of the first order field. So why such a deafening silence?

<BLOCKQUOTE id=quote><font size=2 face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" id=quote>quote:<hr height=1 noshade id=quote>if the first-order electric and gravity fields appear to be instantaneous, why is there no experiments reported on instantaneous signalling? Coaxially oriented dipole antennae can sense no transverse radiation from each-other, just the variations of the first order field. So why such a deafening silence?<hr height=1 noshade id=quote></BLOCKQUOTE id=quote></font id=quote><font face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" size=2 id=quote>

Radiation and related wave phenomena, of course, propagate at lightspeed. Only the force fields in gravitation and electrodynamics propagate ftl. We can't control astrophysical sources, so we can't use them for signaling.

Laboratory masses and charges are fairly limited too. We can make them large, or we can drive them at a high frequency, but not both together. The closest we have is the Walker-Dual experiment, which was done both with charges and masses, and obtained indications of ftl results (no detectable propagation delay) in both cases.

People are trying to do this. It is just very, very hard. -|Tom|-

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People are trying to do this. It is just very, very hard. -|Tom|-
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The funny thing is that it must be very-very easy. A 5 by 5 meters phased array of 10 cm dipole antennae (dipoles normal to the array plane) should generate a longitudinal field of very sharp directivity, so a few tens meters distance would bring virtually no attenuation, making the scheme effectively unidimentional. Thus, we are talking about longitudinal field variations created by about some thousand coulomb charged dipole in what is effectively a near-field case. It is, essentially, a 1:1 electrical transformer... And, btw, an effective cancellation of transverse radiation can be done through appropriate phasing of the array's elements.