Comment by pdonis

Comment by pdonis 3 days ago

4 replies

> Gravitational waves carry momentum and energy (and therefore mass), just like electromagnetic waves.

No, EM waves do not have mass. They are massless. They carry momentum and energy, yes, but not mass.

In GR, the source of gravity is not "mass", it's stress-energy. EM waves carry stress-energy even though they are massless.

Gravitational waves do have some aspects that are analogous to EM waves, but there is a key difference: gravitational waves do not have any stress-energy. They are pure spacetime curvature in vacuum. So while there is a sense in which they carry momentum and energy, since properly constructed detectors can extract momentum and energy from them, they do not carry any stress-energy and the momentum and energy they carry cannot be localized the way momentum and energy in EM waves can.

cyberax 3 days ago

> No, EM waves do not have mass. They are massless. They carry momentum and energy, yes, but not mass.

OK, EM waves can get _transformed_ into mass.

  • pdonis 3 days ago

    > EM waves can get _transformed_ into mass.

    In the sense that they can be absorbed by matter and (possibly) increase the invariant mass of the matter, yes.

cyberax 2 days ago

> gravitational waves do not have any stress-energy

Wait, what? Of course, they do!

It's just not localized, like in regular classic EM waves.

  • pdonis 2 days ago

    > Of course, they do!

    No, they don't. Read what I said carefully. I did not say gravitational waves do not carry "energy". I said they do not have any "stress-energy". In other words, they are vacuum solutions of the Einstein Field Equation--their stress-energy tensor is zero. That is a true statement, and I contrasted it with EM waves, whose stress-energy tensor is not zero.

    > It's just not localized

    This is a consequence of the fact that their stress-energy tensor is zero, so there is no tensor that describes "energy carried by gravitational waves".