If you're willing to admit that light can change direction due to gravity then you admit that light, generally speaking, is effected by gravity. Now, let's say you have two rays coming from star 321. Ray A has a straight show to Earth. Ray B, however, coming from a point exactly adjacent to the point Ray A is immitting from, is "bent" by the gravitational field of star 654 then back to a point adjacent to Ray A on earch by bending around star 987. Are you saying that someone standing on Earth would see point A (from Ray A) 4 million years ago and simultaneously point B (from Ray B) 8 million years ago? The light is traveling from essentially the same point, and traveling at the same velocity, so Ray B must take longer to arrive at Earth than Ray B. At that rate, the person standing on the Earth could watch the death of star 321 twice, thanks only to a well-placed pair of gravitational fields. In any case, if light can be bent by a gravitational field, that suggests that there is a pull of sorts on the light. You can't suggest that it pulls everything... except light once it's perpendicular to the tangent of the gravitational field. That's like saying everything has a velocity... except things that jump up and down at the third hour of every seventh Sunday. It's not logical to say that gravity has an effect on light when it's convenient to view by today's means, but no effect when it disagrees with one of the greatest minds to ever live. Does that make me right? Of course not. I even said it was a crack-house thought process. But does that make me wrong? Nope. Only math and lots of experiments can make me wrong. Hopefully I will have a chance to prove myself wrong in a few years. Nexxo, I never claimed to be smarter than anyone, so don't try to give me that "stop thinking you're better than anyone else" ********. If you want to disprove that's one thing, but blatent flaming is just rediculous. Have a good one, guys. I finished my english paper and now I'm gone.
::EDIT:: Just read true the previous posts. And it has hardly remained on topic. So my post doesn't fit anymore. (Didn't say anything new either though) L
No problem with that. My thought is that it is good to keep an open mind, but as far as scientific proof goes, light in a vacuum travels at c (no more, no less), and gravity does not attract light but curves the space-time it travels through. Moreover I think you are tying up two vectors which are actually independent from each other. OK, experiment. The tennis ball launcher mentioned before, launches a tennis ball in a horizontal direction from a nozzle located three feet off the ground. At exactly the same time, you let go of an identical tennis ball at the same three feet off the ground. Which ball will hit the ground first? The answer is that they both hit the ground at the same time. Why? Because their movement/acceleration along the vertical vector is totally independent from their movement/acceleration along the horizontal vector. With light it is the same. Even if light were "attracted" by a black hole (rather than just following a straight line right into the gravity well of space-time), acceleration and speed along that gravitational vector is totally independent of its speed c along its straight-line vector. But we know from scientific observation and experiment that garvity curves space-time. I can't follow that line of reasoning at all, I'm afraid. Can you clarify? But I do think we have already discussed how gravity bends the path of light, by curving space-time, rather than affecting light directly (and think about it for a second: if light HAS NO MASS, than HOW CAN GRAVITY ATTRACT IT?). Cheese already proved you are wrong, mathematically, by quite simply demonstrating that the dimensions of your formula are incorrect. I never said you did. I said that stating that Einstein's E=mc^2 is wrong and your formula is correct, logically implied that you out-thought him. I was merely pointing out that given that that man was exceptionally smart in this field (not to mention there is a LOT of evidence to support his formula), that this was rather unlikely (a lot of people smarter than the both of us have tried). So please stop making it personal, OK?
You know this demonstrates why I stopped posting in physics related threads, frankly I'm disappointed in myself for giving in and posting in this one. This has gone far too far, we don't tolerate flaming on these boards so either get on topic and post useful information/discussion about the variability of the speed of light* or don't post. It's that simple. General/special relativity both have some truely staggering consequences, the web contains a plethora of information on both... if you're interested then I'd suggest eating all the knowledge the web will give you before you consider altering them. The former involves maths so complicated it's often taught as an option to third year maths students at Oxford uni and while the later might seem relatively straightforward (it's usually taught 'properly' in the first year of a physics degree here in the UK and usually quite poorly at a-level) it's subtleties often confuse... it's certainly not one of my favourite physics topics! So please stay on topic and be civil, I don't want to be forced to do anything nasty to anyone's accounts Rob. *This is how I understand the current physical interpretation of 'the speed of light', (I'm a physicist by job, two master's degrees, I'll have a Ph.D. in a month or two - yet by no means do I consider myself an expert in this field). The speed of light in a vacuum is generally thought to be a constant (c, ~3x10^8 ms^-1), this doesn't mean that light can't travel faster or slower than this speed, it depends on the refractive index of the material it's in, but when light's in a vacuum it's thought to always travel at this speed. Not all theorists believe this or assume it, some recent experiments might have indicated a minor fluctuation in this, but we're talking tiny numbers. This said, lots of things can travel faster than the speed of light in a given medium. When a charged particle travels faster than the speed of light it emits cherenkov radiation (http://rd11.web.cern.ch/RD11/rkb/PH14pp/node26.html). When you're talking about waves I thnk it's generally accepted that the phase velocity can be pretty much anything (including being above light vacuum speed) and the upper limit for transmitting information with a group velocity is the speed of light. If you've no idea what phase/group velocities are I'd suggest you google them. Why not look up solitons too, they're fun. You can interpret special relativity in a few interesting ways... any particle with mass would have infinite momentum (and therefore energy) if it travelled at c, but above this speed it would have an imaginary momentum which is frankly ill defined. Could there be a whole host of particles travelling around at v>c that don't interact with our world of real mass? I doubt it.
