I’ve heard of a light cone, but never heard the term gravity cone. Seems to me a light cone is kind of misnamed or arbitrary. It’s more like an information cone. There’s nothing special about light. You just can’t feel things that happen outside the light cone. So if a big object moves outside your light/gravity cone, you’ll never feel the gravity wave. Should it just be thought of as a gravity cone? Or a causality cone? Or an information cone?
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Am I misunderstanding this concept?
In: 10
I think you’ve got a decent grasp of the concept; it’s just that naming things is hard. You’re right that it’s not a *light* cone specifically, but then again, it isn’t really a cone either. The names are based on specific thought models (“imagine 2D space as XY coordinates and time as Z; now imagine the cone that extends upwards along the Z axis that corresponds to how far a photon could reach over time from any given point on the XY plane…”). There’s always going to be some slippage between the model and the reality it describes.
Gravity cone? Sure. Causality bubble? Why not! The name itself is ultimately a little less important than the concept it’s gesturing at.
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