Is gravity traveling at the speed of light?

[Skyler4856]

Remember gravitons are still yet to be confirmed and in my opinion gravity shouldn't be considered a force carried by a particle.

[theend3r]

Depends on your point of view. In quantum mechanics it could travel even faster than light. I prefer to view gravity as a curvature of space because otherwise we have those backhole problems.

[K^2]

Remember gravitons are still yet to be confirmed and in my opinion gravity shouldn't be considered a force carried by a particle.

Well, you don't have to quantize gravity. So yeah, in pure GR, such a thing as graviton is neither sensible nor necessary. But if you want to consider matter fields in GR setting, without quantizing the fields, you are kind of screwed. So if you want to consider how gravity influences interactions of elementary particles, there are just no mathematical methods for dealing with this without introducing graviton.

As for whether or not there is such a particle in nature, that's really just a matter of perspective. You can say that a photon is just a convenient mathematical model, and that there is really no such particle either. Then, of course, one has to concede that from this perspective, there are no particles at all, and all of the particle phenomena are just artifacts of first quantization in our measuring equipment. There is nothing wrong with such perspective from philosophical standpoint, but from perspective of physics, math with particles is not just easier, it's doable, unlike what it would be if we just had the fields.