Carl Bjerknes demonstrated that pulsating spheres in water will repel or attract depending on their phase relative to each other. Since gravitation is a wave, why can’t this be used to create anti-gravity?

Question

https://www.annualreviews.org/doi/pdf/10.1146/annurev.fl.14.010182.000245?

> Vilhelm Bjerknes’ father, Carl Anton Bjerknes, was professor of mathematics at Norway’s only university in Oslo, or Christiania as the city was called at the time. He was exploring the forces between bodies moving in a fluid, and found a striking analogy between these forces and electrostatic and magnetic forces. In particular, he found that two spheres submerged in water, pulsating at the same frequency, would be acted upon by attractive or repellant pressure forces which would satisfy Coulomb’s law, except that they would have the opposite direction: attraction would result when the pulsations were in phase, repulsion when the phases were opposite.

Since it’s been experimentally demonstrated that gravity is indeed a wave, why can’t this same principle apply to gravity waves? In fact, unless all gravity waves must invariably be completely in phase, no matter what other circumstances may exist, then why aren’t there naturally occurring objects which repel each other through the action of gravity?

I’m led to understand that perhaps this has something to do with the difference between waves propagating through a medium and waves propagating through space. Is that correct? If so, then why? And by what mechanism does it work?

In: Physics

Answer 1

Gravity is not a wave though.

Two gravitational objects of black hole or neutron star mass rotating around each other *create” waves in space-time.

I would think that the earth traveling around the sun (and vice versa) create some sort of *tiny* ripples but detecting these, much less using them (in an out of phase way as you cite) for anti gravity purposes wound be near impossible.

What I would think you need is someway to create negative curvature of space-time to counteract the positive curvature we’re currently caught in on the earth’s surface to negate the effect of gravity we feel at the surface of the earth.

That way a small force against the earth would catapult an object maintaining that negative curvature out to space, accelerating as it goes maintaining that constant negative curvature.