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Underground > Laboratory >

Speed of light isn't constant after all...

09:42 / 09.08.02

Or at least it might not be... According to various articles around the web, Australian scientists are proposing that the speed of light may have slowed since the creation of the universe [BBC news].

Quote: According to Paul Davies, a physicist at Macquarie University, Sydney, this can be explained only if the speed of light or electron charge has changed since then. "But two of the cherished laws of the Universe are the law that electron charge shall not change and that the speed of light shall not change, so whichever way you look at it we're in trouble," he says.

The potential implications of this are - he claims - that everything from faster-than-light travel, to our understanding of black holes, to Einstein's concepts of relativity themselves may be up for grabs...

11:19 / 09.08.02

This is very exciting as more and more data shows the need for theories to supercede relativity and quantum mechanics. In a related (preliminary) result, there has also been some evidence that the fine structure constant of the universe is changing. See here.

I have no idea whether those 11 dimensional string theories can cope with this, but it definitely seems to be te case that the closer you look at physics, the wierder it gets. Unsurprising, perhaps, since we have a rock solid intution for physics within a rather narrow speed and scale and these phenomena are all well beyond that.

17:42 / 13.08.02

Work in these directions continues to support the idea that there are no constants, only minute relational details we have not yet uncovered which cause the value in question to behave as a constant for the range of data we are able to measure it within. As an example, gravity. The pull of gravity is constant on the surface of the earth, yet we discover that it changes further away. Study reveals that the force of gravity is dependent upon the relation of the mass of the attracting bodies, and the universal gravitational constant. Chances are, close examination of this constant will reveal more subtle relations which produce this "constant", as these minute values do not fluctuate measuribly within the range we use for measurement.

This is all signifigant as science has long held the views of a deterministic universe, and sought to find universal "truths" and constants to support these truths. But if constants are not actually constant, then one must move to a non-determinstic view of the universe, a chaos-driven view such as is explored in quantum mechanics. Fractal physics: the closer you look, the more detail is revealed, but there is no underlying fundamentals, only smaller and smaller details.

15:31 / 20.10.03

On the other hand... (from Nature):

Gauthier's team found that information encoded in a pulse travelling through a gas of potassium atoms takes longer to be detected than information in a pulse travelling through a vacuum at speed c. Even if the pulse's group velocity far outstrips the speed of light, the information velocity can never exceed c.

In other words, the pulse arrives sooner but takes longer to announce its arrival.

The article has an interesting summary of the previous work, which had to do with leading edges of photons, which is such a tiny, tiny thing that it makes my head hurt to conceive of it.

18:58 / 20.10.03

Actually, I may have meant to put that post here, in the Teleportation thread.

It's about information traveling faster than light.

10:35 / 24.10.03

So presumably we can look forward to technology in the next century that lets us manipulate the Planck variable? Cool..

22:21 / 08.12.03

So from what I've read I gather that most of physics relies on 3 constants:

a.) The Gravitational Constant (G)

b.) The Speed of Light (c)

and 3.) Plank's Constant (insert letter here)

I remember reading an article about how the Gravitational Constant was found out not be constant. This thread is about how the speed of light isn't a constant, and Plank's constant was "discovered" when Planck was throwing random numbers inot an equation to balance it out. If I remember correctly (and I could be completly wrong) that equation used the speed of light as a constant.

So, basically, what I'm getting at is that there are no more constants in physics.

00:37 / 09.12.03

a creationist named Barry Setterfield published a paper on this back in 1981.

17:58 / 09.12.03

So, basically, what I'm getting at is that there are no more constants in physics.

Yep, the mystics were right. The only constant is change.

18:22 / 09.12.03

Although modern physics consists of a little bit more than "no constants" and "change".