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Old 17th February 2013, 03:09 PM   #925
Farsight
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Join Date: Mar 2008
Posts: 2,640
Originally Posted by edd View Post
Do you really not see what you've done there?
Let me fix it for you: when an electromagnetic wave runs through the electromagnetic field the electromagnetic field waves.
A field isn't something magical and mysterious that's something separate to space edd. It's a condition of space. Have a read of Einstein' s 1920 Leyden Address and his 1929 talk on the history of field theory. This NASA article on gravitomagnetism is worth reading too. It says spacetime instead of space, but you should nevertheless catch the drift of "Einstein was right again. There is a space-time vortex around Earth, and its shape precisely matches the predictions of Einstein's theory of gravity".

Originally Posted by edd View Post
Even then you're stretching it too far to say the field would be displaced.
Maxwell said "light consists of transverse undulations in the same medium that is the cause of electric and magnetic phenomena.” And when a light wave interacts with an electron, it makes it move. And as you know, both have a wave nature. They aren't billiard balls.

Originally Posted by edd View Post
Plus if space were doing the waving it'd be a gravitational wave. And be quite different.
Light waves are transverse waves. Gravitational waves aren't. They're different, but not totally different. The coordinate speed of light varies in a non-inertial reference frame such as a gravitational field, and c=√(1/ε0 μ0). Personally I wonder if this is why LIGO hasn't detected gravitational waves. Like it's trying to measure length-change with a rubber ruler.
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