Evolving Electromagnetism?

nugget writes "An article in the Sydney Morning Herald announced that scientists led by a team of NSW University astrophysicists in Australia have found evidence that one of the fundamental forces of physics, electromagnetism, has changed since the universe's creation some 14 billion years ago. This may prove what many scientists have suspected for some time. Electromagnetism may be relatively new and might have evolved sometime after the laws of physics started with the big bang. If it's correct, this is big news."

Comments

Researcher's Web Sites

[martyb]

Scientists who reviewed the findings have not found any obvious flaws. Professor Webb was "not surprised". His team, including Professor Victor Flambaum and PhD student Michael Murphy, both of NSW University, had "been working like hell".

Here are links to the web sites of each of the investigators:

• Professor John Webb: http://www.phys.unsw.edu.au/STAFF/ACADEMIC/webb.ht ml
• Professor Victor Flambaum: http://www.phys.unsw.edu.au/STAFF/ACADEMIC/flambau m.html
• Michael Murphy: http://bat.phys.unsw.edu.au/~mim/res.html

Re:Researcher's Web Sites

[lucius]

Talking about the people involved, I have had both Victor Flambaum and John Webb as lecturers (I'm studying physics at UNSW).

John Webb told us that apparently he bumped into Victor on the stairs one day and they got to talking, that's where the collaboration started.

Interestingly, Victor is one of 4 russians in the theory department here. I think they emigrated from russia post communism.

Anyhow, just wanted to do some name-dropping...

Re:Finally.....

[Anonymous Coward]

Holy fuck, man, get a grip - that posting was obviously facetious.

Re:Finally.....

[pubudu]

People like you insist that the earth is only around 4 thousand years old (according to the bible) when we have perfect evidence that its age is in the billions.

The evidence is far from "perfect", for it assumes the very thing it's trying to prove. The debate is one between modern science and revelation, each one claiming to be able to explain the All. Modern science claims a victory in the realm of cosmology because the age of the All according to the Bible is about 6000 years and the age according to our observations is something over 10 billion. Taking explainations of phenomena we observe today, we find that it would have taken several billion years for them to produce the world we observe now.

Yet this proof only begs the question. In order to say the All is X billion years old based upon current observations, we must assume that the theories gleaned from such observations were applicable X billion years ago; the Bible says they were not. Showing that the Bible is in contradiction with this assumption does not prove this assumption, nor do any proofs based upon this assumption.

This finding cannot sway the balance between the two in either direction. If the strength of the EM force does change over time, its change would presumably occur according to rules, is what the scientist would respond. Of course, if we cannot use scientific theories to predict the actual situation at some arbitrary point in the past included in the set of points that theory claims to be able to predict, then we can't actually say that the stated change has occurred.

The debate between science and religion seems to have a mafia-trial character to me. The defense attorney says the prosecution's claim that his client is guilty of murder because he ordered the hit is preposterous, for medical expert after medical expert has testified that the victim died from a loss of blood caused by numerous holes in his body, caused by bullets fired by someone other than his client. The prosecution, on the other hand, repeatedly plays an audio tape of the order without actually showing that the person on the tape is the defendent. The defense says that it can't possible be his client, for we know that the victim bled to death...

Re:Finally.....

[Transcendent]

The evidence is far from "perfect", for it assumes the very thing it's trying to prove.

Actually Carbon Dating brings enough evidence to prove that the earth is far older than 4000 or 6000 years. For anyone unfamiliar with it, carbon dating deals with the half-life of the C14 element. Current methods allow us to date a specific creature back around 50,000 years, far past the dates told by the Bible. Dating with other radioactive isotopes such as uranium and potassium-40. Dating this way measures the ratio of the daughter and parent decay chains. This method allows us to date back billions of years. The probibility of this form of dating being off by billions of years is... well... near impossible. This method is not assuming the very thing it's trying to prove... they didn't assume that the earth was 14-16 (depends on who you're asking) billion years old and use that as a reference point. (Caution: Obvious statement ahead) They used the decay rates of known isotopes and calculated backwards from the present ...it's impossible to say that the accuracy of mathematics can have an 90% error rate. It may not be perfect, but it's accuracy is perfect enough to prove the dates from the Bible wrong.

Re:That is impossible.

[Anonymous Coward]

Score 4 ^ , funny!!

Re:I hate surveys

[Anonymous Coward]

the educational system in america barely teaches me anything

Obviously :)

Finally.....

[Transcendent]

Well... First off I think that the person above who said that light is always the same had a pretty set 1-track mind.... and I hate people like that. Especially because you think god created everything and that's just the way it is. *Everything* is perfect because god made it that way. ...Bull. I'm not athiest. I believe in god strongly, but you need to stop hiding from the unknown behind that belief. God may have created the universe, but what mortal man made it the rule that the universe cannot change at all? What if god intended it to be this way? Man (or woman for the damn PC people out there) has no right to speculate on the motivation or the plannings of 'god's creations. People like you insist that the earth is only around 4 thousand years old (according to the bible) when we have perfect evidence that its age is in the billions. People like you started the Crusades that killed hundreds of people just because they thought differently. People like you killed and put into jail and killed the great thinkers of the past. This new theory about the universe is not the danger... your own set disposition is what dangers the progress of science and of our society in whole...

Re:Finally.....

[Transcendent]

You can never be to careful with all the nuts runnin around...... maybe they even visit slashdot once in a while....

Re:Finally.....

[Dancin_Santa]

Interesting way to put the whole Science/Religion debate into perspective.

As Rodney King would say, "Can't we all just get along?"

Dancin Santa

Re:Finally.....

[pubudu]

The evidence is far from "perfect", for it assumes the very thing it's trying to prove.

Actually Carbon Dating brings enough evidence to prove that the earth is far older than 4000 or 6000 years.

...

This method is not assuming the very thing it's trying to prove... they didn't assume that the earth was 14-16 (depends on who you're asking) billion years old and use that as a reference point.

That wasn't at all what I was arguing; I am saying that the whole scientific method presupposses that the applicability of a given theory to a given point in time is based solely on that theory (assuming that it is a good theory). General relativity breaks down at (or near) singularities, but that's OK since it says it will break down there. The assertion made, however, is that it does hold true at other points.

Your example of carbon dating is actually excellent in this matter. Carbon-14 decays at a given rate and is produced by the Sun's interaction at given rates; thus, the ratio of C-14 to C-12 gives a rough appoximation of the time since the sample ceased to incorporate new Carbon (e.g., because it died). Yet in order to say that a given ratio in a given sample sets its age to actually be that age, we must assume that the natural processes of C-14 creation and decay occurred at all points between that time and the present; this is precisely the claim that Creationism contents. We can say with a high order of certainty that, if the world came into being through natural processes, it is about 4 billion years old. Producing the above result repeatedly and in a variety of different ways, however, in no way brings us closer to certainty that the world did come into being through natural processess.

Of course, one could avoid this whole argument by saying that, though God did say these things, He said them as a parable in order to show that the Sun, rather than being a god or even the source of all life, is rather unimportant and was actually created after plants had begun to flourish. But of course the support for this is just as weak as that for fundamentalist Creationism or scientific naturalism.

Re:Finally.....

[codeButcher]

Modern science claims a victory in the realm of cosmology because the age of the All according to the Bible is about 6000 years and the age according to our observations is something over 10 billion.

Wrong. The age of the universe according to some churches' interpretations of the Bible is about 6000 years. The original Hebrew grammar allows for all the time you need between the first two verses of Genesis 1 (as some translations have correctly shown, or translators, like Luther, shown in comments in the margin). Go check it out! :-)

Incidentally, how did the ancients measure a ((+/-) 24 hour) day? Surely by observing the rising/setting of the sun! Now of course it does not make sense to create the demarcator for days (i.e. the sun) only on the fourth of such days. So, "days" should rather be translated as "periods of time" (which is again borne out by the original Hebrew). The fact that sun, moon and stars all appeared during the same "day" whould suggest to me that they were obscured by some dust or other material in the atmosphere (been created already in the first verse), consistent with some cataclismic event like a comet or asteroid hitting the earth and causing the utter chaos of verse 2 - and the gradual clearing of it revealing them simultaneously.

Re:Finally.....

[pubudu]

The original Hebrew grammar allows for all the time you need between the first two verses of Genesis 1

You may be right on this point, that the Hebrew does allow for time to pass between the first two verses, but if that were the intended meaning, I would expect va-t'hiye ha-aretz rather than v'ha-aretz haytah. Of course, the matter is solved in the fifth verse, yom echad, one day, rather than the expected yom rishon, the first day. The way to explain the difference is that the Bible is here emphasizing that this occurred in one day, rather than simply on the first day, however long it might have taken for that to come about.

Incidentally, how did the ancients measure a ((+/-) 24 hour) day? Surely by observing the rising/setting of the sun! Now of course it does not make sense to create the demarcator for days (i.e. the sun) only on the fourth of such days. So, "days" should rather be translated as "periods of time" (which is again borne out by the original Hebrew)

Yom means day; it is unrelated to the words for time (z'man and ayt). The Bible is quite explicit as to what constitutes a day, and there was evening and there was morning (Gen. 1:5, 1:8, 1:13, 1:19, 1:23, 1:31). Evening and the setting of the sun are two different times (cf. Deut. 23:12).

The fact that sun, moon and stars all appeared during the same "day" whould suggest to me that they were obscured

The sun, moon, and stars did not appear on the fourth day; they were made on the fourth day (Gen. 1:16). Since the word is va-ya'as rather than asa, God did this after He said ... (Gen. 1:14), and since said is va-yomer rather than amar, He said ... after the previous verse, which remarks that the third day had passed. That is, the grammar of the Hebrew leads inescapably to the conclusion that God made the sun, moon, and stars on the fourth day, and precludes any reading which would have them made on the first day and remain hidden until the fourth, when they appeared.

Cosmic Inflation

[TH4L35]

IANAAP (I am not an astrophysicist), so I am asking you brainiacs to tell me if these findings will help smooth out the kinks in the cosmic inflation model of early universe expansion. I never liked the idea of arbitrary expansion phase (although for some very strange reason my intuition is not so violently opposed to physical constants not being, er, constant). I know they may not be directly related, but can this idea explain the observations that we currently explain with an expansion phase?

I thought that this was already accepted.

[mordorian]

Doesn't current theory describe the EM force as condensing out of the Electro-Weak force early in the universe's creation?

Re:I thought that this was already accepted.

[krlynch]

Doesn't current theory describe the EM force as condensing out of the Electro-Weak force early in the universe's creation?

Yes, current theory states something to that effect (it says that electromagnetism is the left over "unbroken gauge symmetry" of the more fundamental "electroweak gauge symmetry", which "breaks spontaneously" as the universe cools, so that only the photon remains massless, while the Z and W bosons become very heavy). But, this discovery is saying something different. In the standard theory, after the electroweak symmetry breaks down to the electromagnetic symmetry, both the weak force and the electromagnetic force have strengths that are homogenous (the same at every point in space) and static (the same at every point in time). So, after electromagnetism emerges out of the big bang, right up to the current time, electricity has acted the same way everywhere in the universe.

These experimental results suggest that quite the opposite is true; what they say is that it looks like the strength of the electromagnetic force is NOT static. The data suggest that electromagnetism was slightly weaker in the distant past than it is today, something in conflict with current theory. And the data seem quite compelling, from a quick read of the paper. What we need now is other research groups with different equipment to go and confirm this result, not just in kind but in number.

This is quite an exciting time to be a physicist :-)

Re:Really?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes.... its true... this man has no dick...

ON WITH THE GHOSTBUSTER QUOTES!

Re:That is impossible.

[Strange Ranger]

I always want to ask dogmatic creationists; What makes you so sure you know the extent of the creation? What I mean is, if God created weather systems, why not evolutionary systems, the expanding universe, and elusive little wood sprites? Who are you to determine the extent and complexity of creation?

Did God create me or did my parents? Maybe the answer is both. God created the reproductive cycle. Same with rain clouds, homo sapiens sapiens, and electromagnetism. I don't beliieve in faith in the unknowable, but I do believe it's conceivable that some Higher Power created the universe and everything in it, including evolution, electromagnetism, solar eclipses, and nervous small minded fundamentalists.

stolen sig- "If the Bible verifies the existence of God, then Superman comics verify the existence of Superman."

Re:Really?

[Anonymous Coward]

It means evidence for (or rather not a refutation of) the higher dimensional universes & string theory. I've seen shit that'll turn you white!

That is impossible.

[SpanishInquisition]

God created light on the first day of the creation and the light is the same now, it could not have changed since it was created perfectly. Anyone who believes in the "Theory of Evolution of Electromagnetism" is a dangerous heretic.

Re:That is impossible.

[ryants]

Athiest and agnostic scientists are not the majority, they're just the loudest.

I grow so tired of defeating morons, but oh well...

http://www.gsreport.com/articles/art000068.html

A survey conducted in mid-1998, reported by Edward J. Larson of the University of Georgia in a letter to the journal Nature, indicates that very few senior scientists in the United States profess a belief in God or immortality

So much for your assertion.

Re:That is impossible.

[grammar fascist]

And yet again we see a typical straw-man argument against creationism. Athiest and agnostic scientists are not the majority, they're just the loudest. (Like you!)

Re:I hate surveys

[Transcendent]

My critical thinking skills aren't related the current state of education today... the educational system in america barely teaches me anything...

I hate surveys

[Transcendent]

If you ever ask a highly recognisable person for their view on a certian subject, most would lie just to keep their reputation.... It's like asking people if they have a fettish for being sh*t on... sure there's people out there who do, but what moron would admit to it?

Re:I hate surveys

[ryants]

If you ever ask a highly recognisable person for their view on a certian subject, most would lie just to keep their reputation....

Of course... it's all a conspiracy...

The scientists are anonymous... their answers aren't published, only the aggregate results... so what would they gain from lying exactly? Do you think the 8% or so who professed belief in a god have lost their jobs or something?

Sometimes other people's criticial thinking skills make me wonder about the current state of education today...

More articles

[james@rtweb.net]

Also available is a New York Times article. The abstract of the paper is available for free; for the full article, pay or wait for the Aug 27th issue of Physical Review Letters.

(If this sounds like an article submittion, it's because it was -- apparently, I got beaten to the punch by a minute or two.)

The NYT article makes this sound like a much bigger deal. This isn't a change during the first few seconds of the universe, this is over a sagan ("billions and billions of years") or ten.

salon coverage

[Anonymous Coward]

Salon has a story on this, too

Really?

[Nastard]

If that's true, just think of the impact it will have on our daily lives. Cats and dogs living together... total anarchy!