Instantaneous gravity

Funny that nobdy really seems to pay attention to the observation that gravity is more or less instantaneous. The earth knows where the sun is going to be 8 minutes into the future? And Pluto knows where the sun is going to be how many hours into the future? Almost like gravity seems to exist outside of time.

I wonder if gravity and time aren't the same thing?
 
Makes me think, what if you had a string that was 1,000 light years long, with a ball on the end... when you tug on the string, does the ball instantly move? (or maybe not a string, maybe a pole).

Thinking about poles, what if you got a pole that was thousands of light years long, and swung it around. Would the pole bend, as the end of the pole could exceed the speed of light? And if it bent, would it actually be bending, or would it just appear to be, and if it is not bending, where does the pole exist?
 
Russ said:
Makes me think, what if you had a string that was 1,000 light years long, with a ball on the end... when you tug on the string, does the ball instantly move? (or maybe not a string, maybe a pole).

Thinking about poles, what if you got a pole that was thousands of light years long, and swung it around. Would the pole bend, as the end of the pole could exceed the speed of light? And if it bent, would it actually be bending, or would it just appear to be, and if it is not bending, where does the pole exist?
Tugging on a string uses EM forces, and Maxwell's equations govern those. Same thing with a pole. As I understand it, EM forces are restricted to light cones. Another one of this class, is spinning a flat disc at some speed w, where the tangent velocity at the edge is c.

The interesting thing about gravity, is it doesn't seem to respect the light cones (which contradicts GR). I remember a professor of mine (one of the better ones) saying something like there's three dimensions of space and then there's time, there's the three quarks and then there's the electron, and there's the three (unified) forces and then there's gravity.
 
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