- #36
PeterDonis
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tionis said:So gravitational waves are static, then? And we are the ones moving towards the geometry where they are?
No, no, no.
Please stop and read carefully. Nothing moves in spacetime. Spacetime is a 4-dimensional geometry that just is, it doesn't move. Objects in spacetime are described by curves, or families of curves, in that geometry. Curves don't move; they just are.
This seems to be the core of your mental block, so I really, really think you need to take some time to understand how the 4-d spacetime model works in a simple context, like SR, before you even think about more complex contexts like this one. Describing it in words tends to be tedious and often not very helpful; but we have a better tool, spacetime diagrams. Crack open a basic SR textbook, like Taylor & Wheeler's Spacetime Physics, and look at the spacetime diagrams, and study how they work. That will give you a visual sense of what I said above. Note particularly that time is one of the dimensions of the diagram, and things "moving" relative to each other just means the curves in the diagram that describe those things approach or recede as you go along the time dimension, as a matter of geometry.