Re: Layman's question about Gravitational waves

On Mar 22, 7:09 am, Sam Wormley <sworml...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Jan Panteltje wrote:
On a sunny day (Thu, 22 Mar 2007 12:55:45 GMT) it happened Sam Wormley
<sworml...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote in <l1vMh.1748$oV.564@attbi_s21>:

Bhushit Joshipura wrote:
I am not a physicist. I know a bit of Electromagnetic wave
propagation.

I went through gravitational waves description on Wikipedia (where
else?). I could understand that "change in mass distribution over
space over time causes gravity to change" - this is gravitational
wave. In other words, information about mass can be detected through
gravitational waves.

Now the question. Can these waves be refracted? [Wikipedia says they
can't be scattered. I don't know whether scattering has anything to do
with refraction.]

Index of refraction for scalar, electromagnetic, and gravitational
waves in weak gravitational fields
http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/1974PhRvD...9.2207P

Gravitational Waves in Matter
http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/klu/gerg/1997/00000029/00000001...

GRAVITATIONAL WAVES HAVE NOT BEEN DIRECTLY DETECTED YET.
Can elves be refracted?
Are they edible?
Lets blurb on wikipedia about it.

So What! Verification came years after detailed predictions, such as

So what? That's like saying Maxwell is vindicated by everything but
direct detection of EM waves, that's what!


o gravitational bending of light by the sun

That's a "gravitostatic" phenomenon. Nothing to do with waves.

o orbital decay due to gravitational radiation

Please point me to the detector that detected said waves.

o positrons
o testing of Bell's theorem
o detection of Ws and Zs

You damn well know better than that, Sam. Those are _inferences_,
not verifications.

AFAIK no direct detection has ever been managed, except possibly
Robert L. Forward's work with coupled pairs of his gravitational
gradient detectors; one driven, the other detecting the local
variations in the g gradient. Yet AFAIK nobody's been willing to call
that "generation and detection of gravitational waves". Why not?


Mark L. Fergerson

.

Relevant Pages

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