Light Speed

[Squee]

I've heard so much debate on wether the speed of light is constant or not. So I just had to post this.

http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99992650

http://aca.mq.edu.au/lightspeed.html

 

[Morat]

  Yep. And if they're right, us evil scientists can spot a tiny change in the speed of light 10 billion years ago. (Yet we seem to miss the orders-of-magnitude that Setterfield and his cohorts require).

  It's a string theory prediction, and I'm curious to see how it holds up. It's consequences for the age of the unverse are interesting. As best I can tell, the universe would be older than previously thought.

 

 

[Faithful1]

Good One Squee! You can expect alot of and from those who get insecure about the implications of this type of evidence...

So my advice is to and at them.

 

[Jerry Smith]

Faithful - I posted a link to a different article that publicized this same preliminary finding before Squee did. I accept evolution, and am not crying or angry about this evidence. A lot of scientists are, but not because they will now have to admit that the universe is young or any such non-sense: simply because they will now have to re-work some of their more esoteric theories - most of which you and I don't even know the name of.

Apart from the "more work to do" aspect, I haven't seen anyone here cry or get angry about these results. As a matter of fact, Morat and LiveFreeorDie have both publically commended Davies for his methodology.

 

[Jerry Smith]

Oh yeah... here is the thread I posted early this morning with a link to an article publicizing the same results. I think you will find some interesting comments in there...

http://www.christianforums.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=20032

 

[Squee]

I was wondering if it may have been posted before. I almost snooped around a bit to see, but eh....

 

[npetreley]

Originally posted by Morat
(Yet we seem to miss the orders-of-magnitude that Setterfield and his cohorts require).

"If the speed of light varies, potentially it could have been anything 12-15 billion years ago when the Big Bang occurred,” Davies says. “The speed of light could have been infinite at that time, which would explain a lot about our current universe.”

Yup. Not even close to the orders of magnitude suggested by Setterfield.

 

[Jerry Smith]

Originally posted by Squee
I was wondering if it may have been posted before. I almost snooped around a bit to see, but eh....

Lots of stuff like that gets double-posted (this one went triple sometime last night)... You get something radical, new, and interesting and it just kind of explodes on the net.

I was just pointing out to Faithful that his remarks about causing grief to "some people" were ill-conceived. I didn't mean to sound critical of you for repeating the post, at all.
 

 

[Jerry Smith]

Originally posted by npetreley




Yup. Not even close to the orders of magnitude suggested by Setterfield.

"May have been near infinite" does not equate to "near infinite s.o.l. has been detected". A slightly smaller fine structure constant 10 billion years ago is what was what was detected. This slight change in the fcs would result in a small change of c, or a small change in the charge of e-.

The "may have been near infinite" is another of the famous bits of hyperbole you get in a press release, and relates to the unsupported notion that the slight reduction detected in the fcs (or in c) was a relic of the tail end of a geometric reduction in the same, starting the moment of the big-bang and slowing toward the end of the so-called "inflationary" period (which may not turn out to have been inflationary at all, if the work here is correct).

 

[Joe V.]

One thing I'm a bit curious about. If the speed of light is slowing as has been suggested (or is not constant and varies), does the expansion of the universe play a role in it, or has this been taken into account? Especially if the universe expansion is actually increasing, it seems to me that light has to travel further across the void, and so it would appear to be moving slower than usual. Is my logic flawed?

And how can anything be "near-infinite"? 1 is as close to infinity as 100 billion billion is.

- Joe

 

[Jerry Smith]

And how can anything be "near-infinite"?

Its called the magic of journalistic hyperbole.

 

[Morat]

  And of course, there's the slight problem that this all occured 10 billion years ago (not 10,000) and that it would mean our estimates of the age of the universe are too young.