More on the Fine Structure Constant

Bonker writes "Neat news from the Beeb. It turns out that data collected from observation of quasars indicates that the fine structure constant of the universe, aka 'Alpha', may have changed since the universe began. It may have been very slightly smaller than it is right now. The article hints that other constants we're familiar with, such as high, holy 'c', may also vary over time. Of course values can't have changed dramatically, because that would mean that low-weight atoms such as carbon would be unstable, and without carbon, there wouldn't be anyone around to measure the fine structure constant anyway." We ran a story about this last year. It looks like the team has continued to check their work for errors and hasn't found any yet.

Comments

Here's a constant astrophysics are free to use:

[TheFlu]

The number of dates I've had in the past year. Of course this tends to cause some division by zero errors.

back to the drawing board

[trb]

Whoa, time to change those #defines to doubles.

Here we go again...

[dimator]

Everyone seems to love carbon. It is highly overrated if you ask me. Hydrogen, now there's an element...

just like C

[g4dget]

const double alpha = 1.0/137;

hack_universe() {
*(double *)&alpha += 1e-9;
}

// don't call this; the universe requires
// double-word aligned doubles

crash_universe() {
*(double *)(1+(char *)&alpha)) += 1e-9;
}

Re:Pi?

[Tablizer]

"While we are at it, we should also chek whether the value of pi is changing. " After that e, sqrt(2), 1 and 0.

Hmmm. Maybe in a dozen billion years or so, my slashdot Karma may be worth more also.