I want to know If we can measure the stickiness of space-time, with
respect to frame dragging.
And also how springy is it ? If I magically remove a heavy object, how
long will it take for the bottom of its gravity well to snap back to
zero?
will it keep going, and create transient negative curvature?

finally, just how far can it be folded? can we tear holes in it?

Do these questions even make sense?

Nick

Apparently we think we can. I'm not up on this area, Wiki could fill you in better than me, but I recall an excellent portrayal of such effect at the beginning of Kip Thorne's popular Black Holes and Time Warps, which is a serious but accessible book about current science and those who continue to discover the secrets of nature. So it's even more enjoyable that it starts our with a semi-science fiction "Introduction," with space craft and robot probes, etc., but of course all the calculations are perfectly accurate according to General Relativity. A cool little story as the traveller checks out black holes of different configurations, finally tapping a large one for power and settling down.

Oh, and welcome to the board, Astaro. These are rather pertinent questions.

Well, beyond the 'fact' that the gravitational effect of a moving (or exploding) mass is propagated at light speed, the exact makeup and effect of "space", its vacuum energy and density are things that are still under investigation and not all that well understood. But then, it has been less than 10 years since a positive cosmological constant has been implied by the observations. If you've got a non-mainstream "theory" about this, we'd love to hear it in the Against The Mainstream forum.

Yep. Nick, meet Janna Levin. Janna, meet Nick.

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