1

If light bends due to the curved spacetime,would not the act of bending light warp space? How does one describe curved light?

user34793
  • 101

1 Answers1

3

Light does curve spacetime. This is discussed in the question Does a photon exert a gravitational pull?.

In many cases we are describing the interaction of very massive bodies with much lighter ones, for example a satellite orbiting a planet. In these cases it's a good approximation to ignore the curvature of spacetime caused by the lighter body. The sort of situation you describe would be the lensing of light by a massive object, and when calculating the bending of the light we ignore its affect on the spacetime curvature. We do this because we expect the effect of the light to be unmeasurably small, and because trying to include the effect of the light makes the calculation vastly more complicated.

Community
  • 1
John Rennie
  • 355,118
  • I present two scenarios: 1. light bending due to gravity. 2. light bending as a result of slight manupilation on Maxwell's equations,this eventually bends the space time. I am inquiring about the plausibility of the latter. – user34793 Sep 06 '14 at 09:05
  • Your scenario 2 is too vague for me to comment. You'll need to be a bit more specific about what calculations you're proposing. – John Rennie Sep 06 '14 at 09:32
  • Can you describe the wave nature of curved light? – user34793 Sep 06 '14 at 09:52
  • The phrase wave nature of curved light of curved light doesn't really make sense. It's one of the fundamental principles of GR that spacetiem is always locally flat. At any spacetime point light propagates locally just as it does in Minkowski spacetime. Indeed, light always travels in a straight line. The trajectory may look curved to external observers but it doesn't look curved to the light. – John Rennie Sep 06 '14 at 09:54
  • Your answer to this question inhibits the existence of a halogram...Observer A recognises a beam of light to be moving straight away from him,Observer B observes the light to be curving,and not assuming a linear path; sounds to me we need to include relativity into Maxwell's equations to account for the observations of B. – user34793 Sep 06 '14 at 10:12
  • @user34793: What is a halogram? If you meant a hologram then this is an interference phenomenon and does not require light to be travelling in a curved trajectory. – John Rennie Sep 06 '14 at 10:14
  • Okay, I am not argue. what about combing relativity and relativity? – user34793 Sep 06 '14 at 10:17
  • @user34793: did you mistype that last comment? – John Rennie Sep 06 '14 at 10:19