Quote Originally Posted by Coelho

Well... you could not push one end of the bar all the distance that you wished at once... remember that a bar that long would have an enormous mass, and so an enormous inertia. If you were pushing it, you only could push it VERY slowly... so, the wave of compression created by your push would be microscopical (as it actually is in hard materials like iron and so).

Honestly this explanation hasn't really cleared it up for me. As I said in the original post, we're doing away with gravity just for convenience sake, hence discounting the object's mass. But even in keeping with gravity and mass, lets just say my finger was strong enough to move the bar a few inches in one quick push. Again the same problem, if it takes 20,000 years (minimum) for the force to reach one end of the bar to the other, how can one end be moving to the side and not the other? If an observer looked at the whole bar from afar, would he see a bar with a traveling bend moving through it like a wave? How could that even work?