Vinicio Coletti's idea about gravitational waves

Do they go faster than light?

First published on September 20, 1999

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What we already know

When an electrical charge is accelerated, the resulting changes in electromagnetic field propagate through space, as electromagnetic waves. These waves are well known and understood and have many practical uses, as everyone knows: radio, tv, radar, etc.
In a similar way, the acceleration of a mass produce changes in the gravitational field that also propagate through the space, as gravitational waves.
Gravitational waves are part of the relativity theory, explaining gravity as a deformation of space-time continuum, caused by the presence of a mass. That's why a solid object, and even a beam of light, deviates its path when passing near a massive object, like a star.
In fact objects and light keep going straight along their path, it is the path, the space itself that is modified by the big mass.
Every accelerating body generates gravitational waves, thus every orbiting planet emits these waves, because the speed vector changes at every instant. However,these waves are normally very faint and have a very low frequency.
Big energy phenomena, like massive neutron stars quickly rotating very close each other, are tought to produce gravitational waves of higher frequency and stronger enough to be revealed here on Earth. Up to now, however, there are not yet evidences of such a reception and new more sophisticated experiments will try next years to prove the reality of these waves.
According to the relativity theory these waves should go at the same speed of light.

My proposal

I have not much to say about the origin of gravitational waves and the relativity theory (well, in fact I couldn't...) but I will concentrate on their speed.
Imagine a water surface: ships and other objects travel at a certain speed. Imagine also that we find a speed limit for all object traveling on that surface, regarless how powerful their engines are.
Then, as everyone knows, there are waves on the surface and their speed can be greatly different for that of the ships traveling on them.
More deeply, I think that the speed of an object traveling through the space has nothing to do with the speed of a deformation of the space itself. Why a deformation of the space-time, that is a gravitational wave, should have the same speed limit of a photon, that merely travels through the space?
In fact I think that gravitational waves could go much faster than light and this also means that their wavelength is possibly much greater, for a specific phenomenon, than the one we compute today. Is it for this reason that we did not reveal yet a gravitational wave? Perhaps. The answer will possibly come from the future space interferometer experiments.
But there is another interesting fact about waves speed: if they really go faster than light, they convey information in a direction opposite to the normal, that is from the future to the past. Thus our universe could be made of two coexisting information lanes, one underluminal and mostly electromagnetic, going from the past (our past) to the future (our future), the other superluminal and gravitational, going in the opposite direction.

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