Why Don’t Gravitational Waves Get Weaker Like The Gravitational Force ?

The following post has been submitted by Brokeeper.

This may or may not be off topic from LENR, but this article points out some interesting observations from the LIGO (Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory) detector and its discovery that gravitational waves act differently than other force waves.

“Why Don’t Gravitational Waves Get Weaker Like The Gravitational Force Does?” by Ethan Siegel a Senior Contributor of Forbes and a Ph.D. astrophysicist

https://www.forbes.com/sites/startswithabang/2019/03/02/ask-ethan-why-dont-gravitational-waves-get-weaker-like-the-gravitational-force-does/#37f1b4412f58

Some highlights:

One of the things we often just accept about the world is that physical effects get weaker the farther away we get from them. Light sources appear dimmer, the gravitational force gets weaker, magnets deflect by smaller amounts, etc. The most common way this arises is through an inverse-square law [1/r^2], meaning that if you double the distance between you and the source that creates the effect you’re measuring, the effect will be one quarter of what it was previously.

So the question is, how can those two be the same thing?

First off, there are fundamental ways that light and gravitational waves are the same. They both:
do carry energy,
do reach infinite distances,
do spread out over space (in roughly a sphere) as you move farther away,
and will be detectable, at a certain distance, in proportion to the magnitude of the
signal.

Because the geometry of space is the same for both light and gravitation, the difference between these two behaviors must lie in the nature of the signal that we can detect.
To understand that, we need to understand how gravity is a fundamentally different kind of force than electromagnetism.

From previous ECW comments about monopoles possibly could exist in the plasma, Siegel addresses the following:
“In electromagnetism, electric charge is conserved; in gravitation, mass/energy is conserved. The fact that we don’t get monopole radiation is important for the stability of our Universe. If charge or mass could spontaneously be created or destroyed, existence would be extremely different!“

Brokeeper