Excellently put. Thanks.

My mistake was in thinking of gravitons as particles and not as waves. Just as the photons from the sun expand as waves and constantly propagate as they spread, graviton waves would do the same. And, just as a birthday cake candle would be visible from light years away given a big enough telescope, the gravitons from a single particle will be detectable light years away given a sensitive enough detector. So it scales down from the sun to a particle.

That makes a lot of sense.

Here's where I still have conceptual trouble with it: When a photon hits something, it reflects (or refracts) and this is its interaction. If that something happens to be an eyeball, then we see it. In that interaction, the photon is stopped from continuing on it's way. If it isn't stopped, then the thing it hit was transparent to it and it is undetectable and thus unmeasureable. It would seem, though, that the same doesn't hold true for gravitons. Gravitons interact with every particle they hit, but then keep on going - totally unaffected, it would seem, by the interaction. Otherwise, the sun would (for example) exert no "downward" pull on people on the nightside of Earth. It's already exerting it's pull on the Earth itself, and yet the gravitons travel right on through and pull on the things on the opposite side of the Earth and then just keep right on going through infinity, interacting with everything they encounter and yet remaining unchanged in the interaction.

The universe is completely transparent to them and yet reacts to them at the same time. How is that possible?

Also, if gravitons travel and propagate as waves, that implies a wavelength and amplitude. Presumably, the amplitude decreases over distance and is what varies inversely with the square of distance between two particles. So what is the wavelength? If two bodies are moving away from one another then redshift is going to lengthen the wavelength and if they are approaching one another then there will be blue shift shortening the wavelength. But what does that mean in terms of gravity? What happens if you get "zapped" with an extremely shortwave pulse of gravity? Does such a question even have a meaning?

I definitely feel like I learned something today: I can tell because I suddenly have so much less understanding.

W