This is quite an interesting forum. I have reading articles here for a couple of days and thought that I would finally register and ask a question. I live in Toronto, Canada and there was an article published in the local papers about Australian scientists that were attempting to prove the Theory of Relativity wrong by proving that the speed of light is slowing down. Can anybody recommend a website, or if anybody has an article please post it. Suggestion are also welcome. Thanks for all your help. Sheldon
The article in question is a brief communication in a recent issue of Nature, Vol 418, pp 602-603. They suggest that the thermodynamics of a black hole might be the proper place to test the theories of the "constants" changing. <p> You'd also have to assume that black holes really exist and are not some exotic form of matter related to Bose-Einstein Condensates: http://spaceflightnow.com/news/n0204/28blackbubble/
"I live in Toronto, Canada and there was an article published in the local papers about Australian scientists that were attempting to prove the Theory of Relativity wrong by proving that the speed of light is slowing down." In what way would the evolution of the value of c prove Einstein wrong? Would it not be (in effect) a rescaling of Minkowskian geometry?
That story seems to have been a media beat-up by Paul Davies. There is some evidence that the speed of light may have slowed down, but the evidence needs careful checking. My personal opinion is that it is dubious.
Even if it proved Einstein wrong, you'd have to understand that for many years Einstein took a value that he discovered and then tried to prove it wrong. In most cases it meant anything that didn't amount to anything, isn't discussed nowadays. As for light slowing down, I would guess it would just be down to the energy eventually decreasing over distance from risidual trace been left and dispersing along the path it took. Which means it fades, and has a spectral shift (which means the wavelengths change)
"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." A few papers which attempt to point out the flaws in Davies argument: http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/hep-th/pdf/0208/0208093.pdf http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/astro-ph/pdf/0208/0208384.pdf
wouldn't the speed of light been infinite at the point when the big bang was a singularity? (can that term be applied here?)
Nobody really knows the real physics of space-time around a quantum singularity (as far as I've heard). Physics as we know it goes out the window when you get close enough to one. Check around the net and see what you can find.
i have... thats why i asked. i usually only ask questions here after i've had no luck finding out myself Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!
John Moffat thinks so: http://www.varsity.utoronto.ca/archives/120/oct07/scitech/faster.html However, it is thought that all the information contained in the pre-inflationary universe didn't travel at the speed of light, but at the speed of inflation.
so it traveled at the speed of inflation up until the point of inflation? Not exactly up to the point of inflation, but rather, during the inflationary period. http://www.biols.susx.ac.uk/home/John_Gribbin/cosmo.htm http://map.gsfc.nasa.gov/m_uni/uni_101inflation.html
