Science a GoGo's Home Page Forums General Discussion Physics Forum Run-away gravity?

Your second statement about curvature isn't considering spacetime itself might have internal structure and be inefficient. It has like 100% efficiency built into that statement which Chris has made. There are multiple solutions to GR and that was not a guarantee and one of the reasons we may not have seen gravitational waves if things were a bit different. Einstein modelled it as a PERFECT FLUID (Chris used that definition) and our detection seems to confirm that was right.

Go back to the example of the flexing say a piece of metal or wood. The flexure in that case holds energy as well but you lose some of the energy to internal and other effects ... the flexure is not 100% efficient and you know the story with metal flexing too many times.

Ignore the flexure itself think about possible inefficiences that may bleed energy from the conversion. The detected gravitational wave showed no dispersion effect that was measurable. So it's like a wave rolling across the ocean with no loss other than the energy fading due to larger volume.

So the statements aren't in conflict just looking at totally different level of accuracy. The second statement is basically now proved correct by GW150914 within certain tight limits which will be something like 99.9999xxx% efficiency at the moment.

Does that help?