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Speed of Light Inconstant?
DHR writes "Australian scientists have discovered that light isn't quite as fast as it used to be." We've done previous stories on these findings. Those of you with subscriptions to Nature can read the actual paper, the rest of us will just have to suffer.
So, does that explain the ever changing warp scale in Star Trek?
Fascism starts when the efficiency of the government becomes more important than the rights of the people.
I've noticed it takes a while for flourescent lightbulbs to turn on. I guess all of the technology bloat has finally taken a noticable performance hit on light.
...cause my exam in Algorithm Construction is only two days away, and I _really_ could use some extra time =)
Would this perhaps be linked to the idea that there's a limited amount of energy in the universe, which is more and more being turned into kinnetic potential as objects get further and further from the center point?
Or perhaps we're just setting aside another 'unbreakable' barrier.
-GiH
the rest of us will just have to suffer.
And given our new knowledge about changes in the speed of light, you'll suffer a little more slowly then you are used to.
"Can of worms? The can is open... the worms are everywhere."
eh their mate, thats not a light.
Now that's a light.
Australian scientists have discovered that light isn't quite as fast as it used to be.
Could this possibly be due to the increase in greenhouse gasses in our atmosphere?
C'mon, it makes just as much sense.
(-1, Raw and Uncut is the only way to read)
While reading the article, I came across this paragraph.
If the speed of light was close to infinity, immediately after the Big Bang, as Davies believes it may have been, our theories about the way energy cooled to form matter, giving rise to stars, planets and people, could be completely wrong.
Excuse me, but how exactly can something be close to infinity?
my other penis is a vagina
Sooo.... thats why I just cant seem to wake up in time to catch the bus. The light was late for me. Will have to get my mum to write a note
This is clearly another symptom of Global Warming. When will you people get the message?
**>>BELCH
Now, at least, black holes won't have to work as hard.
> "That's illegal. It would be like a cup of coffee sitting on your desk getting hotter," Lineweaver says
Placing a coffee cup on top of my laptop and running Microsoft Outlook provides the exactly same effect. Where can I get my Nobel prize?
In October, 1971, American physicists took four super-accurate atomic clocks, kept two on the ground and put two on commercial jets flying at 1000 kmh in opposite directions around Earth.
When the planes landed, the scientists found what they were hoping for: The clocks on the high-speed journeys were ticking a few billionths of a second behind their stationary friends.
Isn't the speed of a jet negligible compared to the speed of the Earth rotating, revolving around the sun, the sun revolving around the center of the galaxy and the galaxy spiralling in the expansion of the universe?
Please explain.
The above post is an editorial, the poster cannot and will not be held responsible for all or in part for it's contents
So if the speed of light is slowing down, could we convert matter to energy, wait millions of years for the speed of light to change, and then convert it back - violating the conservation of energy laws?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Even constantly improving the model!
Since most of us don't have the subscription I deduce that the majority of replies will come from AC's and be composed of nonsense.
Appended to the end of comments you post. 120 chars.
There were a group of people in a room of different professions, and a theorem was put forth onto the board that stated that all Odd Numbers Are Prime. Each person was supposed to disprove this.
The mathematician started off by looking at each number.
1, 3, 5, 7, 9.... 9 is not prime, the theorem is false.
The social worker turned in a long sheet of paper going "2 is prime, 4 is prime, 6 is prime..." etc.
The physicist turned in the following:
1... 3... 5... 7... 9 (Experimental Error), 11, 13.....
/^[A-Z0-9._%+-]+@[A-Z0-9.-]+\.[A-Z]{2,4}$/i
I guess that means I'll have to take in the 'ol starship for yet another speedometer recalibration. sigh...
"Hey brother Christian with your high and mighty errand / your actions speak so loud I can't hear a word you're saying"
Perhaps it is because I belong to the Physics Establishment, but it seems like early hype. I do not have a subscription to Nature, but I'm sure the results are preliminary and have error bars larger than the effect itself.
While such an fundamental upset is certainly possible, I will hold my reservations until the data has been pored over by these physicists' peers and their experiment repeated with greater precision.
The ramifications of varying speed of light theories are quite significant, and most of them tend to break physics. Take everything with a grain of salt.
---
This sig was generated by a Barrel of Attack Ninjas for WallsRSolid (591098).
One possibility, though, is that the structure of the vacuum in space has changed. This is where we get into the rather spooky world of quantum physics. When light travels through a medium other than a vacuum, such as glass or water, it slows down. A vacuum, far from being empty, is teeming with quantum "virtual" particles that flit in and out of existence.
Sometimes those particles become real, such as under a strong electric charge, Lineweaver says. If the vacuum of space is changing uniformly across the universe, just as the universe is expanding uniformly, it could affect the speed of light.
Well... this was the hypothesis that was given in the article... and from the looks of this, it seems that there is a possibility that light didn't slow down at all. Here he explains that it is the medium that light is travelling in that is slowing it down. So light's top speed in a vacuum may still be the same... c, but the medium, the universe, is changing. Who knows.
But if light is slowing down, then that faster than light travel maybe possible. However, how the hell do you see anything when your going faster than any signal? Well... maybe you can communicate with the spooky particles and get instant communication while travelling at faster than light speeds. Of course you'd best be sure your data arrived promptly, as you'll never see the planet you just rammed.
Back in my day, light was blimblamming all over the place! We had GOOD light in those days. Yessiree, you couldn't go outside with your onion strapped to your belt (as was the fashion at the time) without getting knocked over by rays of light all the time! Not like today's LAZY light, mind you.
--------
Bleah! Heh heh heh... BLEAH BLEAH!!! Ha ha ha ha...
Jeez, nothing reported in that digital rag is exactly new. I knew most of those facts at the ripe old age of 10.
The article reads like a Readers Digest condensed version of the theory of relativity. Was it a slow day so he broke out a 1979 Geographic World Book and scammed their article?
"Motion, it turns out, slows time - one of the funny effects of the law of relativity. At low speeds, the effect is slight and makes no difference to our daily lives."
I learned this in the Superman flick when the Big S flew around the earth to save his sweetheart. Then went to the libray and read up on it.
Too many people in the academic world feel they must publish. Fine, do it, but don't rehash. Show me something new, groundbreaking.
BORED with the scientific community as of late.
Puto
The Revolution Will Not Be Televised
This is exactly the case put forward by Dr. Walt Brown (Ph. D.).
Daniel
isn't quite as fast as it used to be...relative to what?
Well, let's see here:
The speed of light -is- always constant in one sense,
simply because the length of 1 meter is defined by the distance light travels in a set time.
Now, from a more physical standpoint: We need more evidence.
Quite a few measurements of c have been done, and a single measurement isn't about to upend all this.
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, remember?
Now, nobody says that relativity is a complete and final theory. It probably isn't. But you still need lots
of evidence to replace it with another theory.
Otherwise, we won't even know if the theory we're replacing it with is better!
It's an interesting theory and experiment, but even so, I'd bet on this being a
freak result, for the simple reason that scientific breakthroughs don't come around that often.
well, we're not all moving at the same speed, really: someone at a pole wouldn't have the same average velocity as someone at the equator. the pole person would be describing a near perfect (except for the wobble) ellipse around the sun, but someone at the equator would be describing an eccentric (in two planes: 'up' and 'down', and 'in' and 'out') orbit. so time would be faster/slower depending on your frame of reference.
The reason Astronomers don't want to accept this is becuase it would change the nature of every cosmological theory they have. They've invested large amounts of time in old theories, why should they learn new ones? It's all about ego for them.
Interesting they suggest that time and motion are different between two frames of reference travelling at different speeds.
Isn't this kinda the idea of relativity? How does it change the speed of light?
The reason Astronomers don't want to accept this is becuase it would change the nature of every cosmological theory they have. They've invested large amounts of time in old theories, why should they learn new ones? It's all about ego for them.
While there is a possible grain of truth in what you say, it's probably vastly overstated.
It would be better to say that extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof. To almost everybody, the claim that the fine structure constant has been changing is pretty extraordinary, and as such requires pretty solid proof before any measurable fraction of people who care about these things will casually accept it.
There is a danger in the iconoclastic argument. Yes, if a new truth is revolutionary and will require everybody to throw out everything they know, everybody will resist accepting that truth. It does not follow that therefore every revolutionary idea which meets widespread resistance must be a new truth.
-Rob
The vacuum energy density of the early universe was much higher. I suspect that this is the cause of their results...
Time to dust off my old quantum mechanics texts...
*** Quantum Mechanics: The Dreams of Which Stuff is Made ***
Yes, they laughed at the Wright brothers. But they also laughed at the Marx brothers. --From A Demon-Haunted World
The second law of thermodynamics is just a statistical consequence of more fundamental laws of physics. I don't see why breaking it is automatically "illegal", while messing with the speed of light is fair game. You get temporal paradoxes if the speed of light is not the same everywhere[1], and that bothers me far more than cups of coffee getting hotter.
[1] General relativity rules out the concept of "everywhere at the same time", so if the speed of light changes, it can't change uniformly, because there's no uniform.
Why should we care what someone with a hotmail account, a geocities web page, and a journal ranting about the moderation system thinks about this? You're probably fifteen.
Isn't Nature a peer-reviewed journal? That usually means that a number of other scientists have received the information prior to printing and have determined it is authentic information. Anything that is skeptical is usually performed (read retested) by the reviewing scientists. Now, I admit that some papers do get by without a proper amount of review because the journal wants to be first to press, however I think better of Nature than that. (I'm such a sucker)
Ok, I'm not a physics major and I didn't get that good a grade back in high school. So I have a few questions, all which may be considered stupid by others who knows stuff... but ok. So go ahead and laugh before you reply ;-)
The discovery means faster-than-light travel, which is prohibited by the law of relativity, may one day be possible.
Why would this mean that faster than light travel will (or might) be possible in the future? Why not today? From what they are saying, the speed of light may have slowed down ever since the Big Bang. For me, that means that as soon as the speed of light has decreased, it should be possible with faster than light speed, right?
If the speed of light was close to infinity, immediately after the Big Bang, [...]
How close to infinity can one be? When are you far from infinite speed and when are you close? "Almost infinite"? What do they mean here?
The photons [...] interact with the electrons in the gas clouds, charged particles that orbit the nuclei of the metal atoms. This leaves a fingerprint on the light as it arrives on Earth, called the fine structure constant, Murphy explains.
How can this be a constant? Is it a universal constant or a constant different for each object? Still, how can this fingerprint be constant?
Thanks.
Will work for bandwidth
I don't know the details of their experiment, but after thinking about it for 60 seconds, here's my idea:
.Dave
Speed is defined as distance divided by time. Instead of assuming the definitions of distance and time have not changed, let's consider that maybe the dimensions of matter have shrunk, or that the definition of time has increased.
This could be possible if according to the Big Bang Theory the universe is slowing down. According to Einstein, a slowing universe would lead to a increase in time (ie. the relative value of time is increasing). This increase in time would appear as an increase in the speed of light.
Hmmm... then again, didn't Einstein also say that the speed of light is constant, regardless of the speed of the light source. That would mean the increase in time as I explained above would lead to a decrease in the length of our 'ruler'. Therefore, this would result in the same calculation of the speed of light.
Thoughts of relatively always hurt my head...
FPGA, Wireless, ASIC, Verilog, VHDL, HW, 10yr exp, Team Lead, Ottawa (More? Email above. slashdotusername=dgmartin98 )
1 is not a prime number. look it up.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
It took me maybe a minute to figure out what was wrong with the picture in your sig link... I was just about to give up, then it hit me !!
Wow !!!
Brilliant !
FPGA, Wireless, ASIC, Verilog, VHDL, HW, 10yr exp, Team Lead, Ottawa (More? Email above. slashdotusername=dgmartin98 )
It's that same group saying the same thing again.
Well, you are the same guy posting the same thing again, although I notice you have a different username than last time. Please tell me you didn't honestly go back to the previous story, pick a random message that got modded up to +5, and repost it here... that would be the ultimate in karma whoring.
-a
How to rationalize theft.
All they do is make sure the stuff looks OK and has no obvious errors, is not internally inconsistant or doesn't actually support the conclusion. This would be especially so where the conclusions are so at odds with established thought.
They often wouldn't agree with the article itself but accept it for publication as a basis for further discussion and work.
It tends to be where the media hype a report with the 'time travel' and end of the worldism stuff that this stuff startsd to look dumb.
BTW Paul Davies is a very respected physicist and if his name is on the paper it should not be disregarded out of hand. He is also a great populariser of science and has written a number of books for the general public on physics.
As other people have pointed out, the fine-structure-constant-is-changing work came out a year ago. The fine structure constant is a function of the speed of light, c, and the charge of the electron, e.
This particular article argues that e can't change much over time without causing inconsistencies, so they conclude that c must have been changing. No new data, no new support for the constant-is-changing theory. (And the original study was pretty damn flawed. This paper isn't bad.)
I would beleive the speed of light is slowing down. Ever since I've been reading slashdot, it just keeps on taking longer and longer to load...
Just keep in mind that science results can be wrong, or falsely interpreted. Remember element 118? It was published in Phys. Rev. Lett. and the authors had to retract it. Just like the 'cold-fusion' thing.
Other news: 2nd Law of Thermodynamics seems to be broken in a small closed environment over short period of time: G Wang et al. 2002 Phys. Rev. Lett. 89 050601
And the cause is those damned kids pirating photons for use in their computer monitors. If this doesn't stop, the movie industry will have no choice but to refrain from producing anything in the visible spectrum.
God plays dice?
He saw some dirty arabs and fired. Too bad it was just some friendly kurds, BBC reporters and his fellow cowboys.
From the flaming the Astronomer gave me, he didn't even want to CONSIDER that these invariences, in fact, may vary. Which I would define as a closed mind living off ego trips, not discovery.
... but since they believe in creation, and not the dogma of darwinian evolution(which still can't explain the consistant, SUDDEN appearance of species throughout the fossil record), they're not taken seriously.
If light is slowing down, then I'd wager money that other "constants" are too.
Hey, I am an astronomer, and I'd love to see this confirmed. But its a very tough experiment and there are lots of possible problems. I'm sure there are also theorists out there who have already incorporated it into their latest model.
But, as the man says, extrordinary claims require extrordinary evidence. It took two totally groups conducting large long term projects, and some anciliary data that could be explained by it, for the reality of the Cosmological Constant to be seriously considered and incorporated into many standard models. And there are still problems with that results, both observationally and theoretically (we're in the process of publishing a paper on it in fact). It'll take a similar amount of effort and length of time for John Webb et al. to do the same with varying fine structure constant. The VLT data is a step, and publication of the paper in Nature meqans they're being taken seriously. Things will get interesting, though, when the VLT data becomes public (a year after observation) and other teams can go over it with independent analyses and try to confirm or refute the result.
But the mass increase wouldn't be there, becuase the space the matter occupies would change relative to it's speed, altering the mass's energy potenial to just what e=mc^2 says it should be. There is no time, no age, no limits to space. Just relative movement in space.
I haven't figured out if the black holes are gobbling things up. Or if we are slowing down and turning into dark matter. Or, if black holes turn quantum particles into dark matter by stopping them from vibrating. Probably all three.
I can't beleive that ./ is now contributing to the increasingly dated notion that light exists.
Dark Sucker Theory Page
This is from the top of my head, and as such, may have some errors, especially dates.
... there are more reasons to think of One as prime that there are to not, and the primary reason to think of it as a non-prime, non-composite integer is one more of practical value than mathematical correctness.
...
Now that that disclaimer is done with
You see, the Fundamental Theorem of Algebra says, briefly, that every number can be reduced to a unique, finite, multiplicative set of prime numbers.
Now, if one were prime, we would run into the terrible, horrible problem of this being false. And all mathematics would slowly fall with it. Because if one were prime, one would be equal to:
1 x 1
1 x 1 x 1
1 x 1 x 1 x 1
et all.
However, before the 1800's or so, one was in fact considered to be a prime number -- as math was not then a practical discipline. At all. And it was considered prime because, from a theoretical standpoint, it is, as it only has the factors of itself and one. Nowhere did it then say that those must be unique factors.
anyway, just thought I'd shed some light, given the posts on top of posts that are a bit off on what it is to be prime.
The article basically said that the scientists had four super-accurate clocks, and sent two of them at very high speed into space and then retrieved them, finding that the two which had been sent into space were behind the others.
If I shake something mechanical with moving parts, it gets messed up, so why wouldn't the same be true for clocks?
I just don't understand how the difference between the clocks can't be due to other factors, and why they would assume has to be because time is not constant. Doesn't it take a lot of energy to get something into space? Couldn't a lot of other factors mess up a clock?
Albuquerque PC
Some creationist scientists explain the disparity between the size of th universe and the fact that we see stars more than 6000-7000 light years away as light slowing down. I tend to agree with them.
Degaussing scares the bad magnetism out of the monitor and fills it with good karma.
It's a theoretical result, not an experimental one.
Peer review doesn't mean it's correct. Even Nature publishes some doozies. (This one isn't so bad, actually... the original one was in ApJ if I recall correctly, which has a lower standard.)
Incorrect; you're putting a lot more into peer review than is actually there. In reviewing an article, the reviewers are expected to read it and note any flaws in the article. Those flaws may be methodological flaws in the experiments, futher experiments needed to eliminate alternate explanations for the data, and all sorts of trivial problems like bad grammar, missed references, etc. But there's a limit to how much a reviewer can do to find flaws in a paper. He can't actually see the experimental equipment and note any problems with it, for instance, which might produce unnoticed systematic errors. It's also very important to note that the recommendations of reviewers are just that; a journal editor can publish a paper in spite of bad reviews if he thinks that there's justification for doing so.
Reviewers are also not expected to try replicating experiments themselves. In fact, doing experiments based on what you've seen in papers under review is considered to be at least bad form and may be unethical depending on what exactly you do. In some competitive fields, people have been known to accuse reviewers of trying to copy their experiments while stalling the original paper to get publication priority, and this is viewed as seriously unethical.
There's no point in questioning authority if you aren't going to listen to the answers.
Okay, Science,
In 10 billion years, take my DNA, clone me, and reconstruct my mind from a computer backup, and when the process is complete, let me know your final answers that you've hopefully really figured out by then:
Actual Speed of light, and whether it varies.
Actual color of the universe.
Actual age of the universe.
Actual origin of the Earth's moon.
Whether we're descended from apes.
What's the nature of human consciousness.
Whether God actually exists or not.
Whether cholesterol is good or bad for you.
Whether global warming is caused by humans.
Whether gun control increases crime rates.
Whether fair-use causes loss of revenue.
Whether flouride causes or cures tooth decay.
Whether there is an actual speed limit for the x86 architecture that isn't eventually overcome by some new hack.
Whether security through obscurity really works.
Whether phenomenology is bunk.
(etc. ad nauseum)
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
This one came from my old chemistry teacher:
A philosopher, a mathematician and a physicist are at one end of a very, very long room. An observer tells them that there's a bottle of fine whisky on a table at the other end of the room, and that they can take as many leaps as they like to get to the other side and claim the prize but that every step must cover half the remaining distance, no more, no less.
The philosopher stands still, and contemplates whether or not the table and the whisky are there at all.
The mathematician does some quick thinking, and works out that he can never really reach the table as there will always be a finite distance, no matter how small, left to cover. He too stands his ground.
The physicist sets off across the room. He makes one, two, three, four jumps until he's withing arm's length of the table, shouts "that's close enough!" and grabs the bottle for himself.
(And after all that, what did I go on to do at university? Yep, astrophysics. Part astronomy, part physics, part mathematics and, at least with the options I took, part philosophy. No wonder I'm not a scientist by profession any more.)
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
Did a search for "Paul Davies" (lead author of the paper supposedly) on Nature's site, and only came up with one old unrelated article. Don't see any links to anything like this on the main page or the Physics section page either... maybe it just hasn't been updated yet.
Sometimes the best solution to morale problems is just to fire all the unhappy people.
i believe the speed of light _is_ constant. perhaps it is not the speed of light that is changing, but the speed of time itself. if the speed of time is increasing, it would appear that the speed of light was slowing down.
this theory would also explain why the universe appears to be expanding. (einstein believed this was impossible).
so if it is time that is expanding, a static universe would appear to be expanding, and a constant speed of light would appear to be slowing.
Speed of Light Inconstant? no not really we are just moving faster and faster and light is
Haven't you noticed the days get shorter as you get older?
Yah, like `pin the DLL on the app' with the exciting `but keep this other app working' option. Or Blue Screen Roulette.
But not XBill. )-:
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
That is almost as crazy as the dude on the street corner who held up a sign saying that the ASCII code is going to undergo a fundimental shift. Thta is crazy! No onf jt hpjoh up cfmjfwf uifn/
Table-ized A.I.
Does this mean when I get old I'll be able to open the refrigerator before the light comes on?
Ok, maybe im just excessively tired at this point of the evening, but im confused. With everything.
How can any level of motion be constant? If you've got a star moving away from you, the light coming from it is redshifted. Therefor, the light should be moving slower, right? If its coming towards you, blueshift, faster moving light. Am I missing something?
.
I am a peer-reviewed published scientist, and they do repeat experiments. And if you happen to get your hands on a scientific journal you can note the difference in times between submitted date and published date. They are more often than not 4-8 months different.
Where can I get my Nobel prize?
How about the "No Bell" prize. That we can do.
Here is a
photo of the previous winner.
Table-ized A.I.
I'm a PhD student at University of Michigan (first year). I appreciate your correction. I am in the process of submitting my second paper to a peer reviewed journal. While not directly experiencing it myself, I was taught that often scientists would repeat experiments that they found suspicious. That is dissapointing that such large claims would not be retested...there's nothing I hate more than reading a paper and seeing "Data not shown".
Barry is an Australian scientist as well. He's a long-time supporter of CDK (C decay).
But of course, when an Atheist thinks the matter through instead of simply reporting what he finds, anything which tends to support CDK is quickly binned. CDK offers a neat, simple solution to speed-of-light objections to a recent six-day creation of the world on one hand, and hard limits to the age of the universe on the other.
`Close to infinity' describes the mental oscillations needed to remain an Atheist in the face of a mounting stack of observations indicating the impossibility of your position.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
This is actually very old news, like 60 years. The truth of the matter is, the rate at which the speed of light decreases is too fast for the "age of the universe" A couple billion years and light would be moving slower than your grandpa on sunday.
"And we have seen and do testify that the Father sent the Son to be the Savior of the World"
1 John 4:14
For instance, the cosmological redshift. Start with a universe that has one photon in it. The universe expands, and the photon redshifts. Now the photon has less energy. What happened to conservation of energy?
IANAP, so I may be completely wrong, and if so, please explain why, but, doesn't the photon get stretched out so that the rate of energy (e/s) recieved is less. Therefore the energy isn't lost and the photon actually has the same total energy, but the energy within a given length of the photon is less.
Interested non physicist.
Nice Marmot
this is quite an old idea, but
What could cause Light to slow down.
What does this mean for Time.
Is light going the same speed and space itself is stretching?
What was the speed of light 4.6 billion years ago?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2004_U.S._Election_c
The only reason that we techies even think that FTL travel would be "cool" is that any imaginable spacecraft, traveling at perhaps 1/4 or even 1/2 lifespeed, would take a number of human lifetimes to go anywhere. But relative to the lifetime of the universe, 60,000 years or so to get to the other side of the galaxy is nothing. Just a quick hop to the Quick-E-Mart. And human lifespan is just an evolutionary adaption (to kill off people who have already breeded) : if we ever can build and fuel an interstellar spacecraft its exceedingly unlikely that human lifespans will still be a limitation.
Seriously : the biochemical tricks needed to stop the aging process will be in our hands (and bodies) LONG before far more fundamental problems, mostly related to the intense radiation caused by hitting blue shifted particles at a substantial fraction of lightspeed and radiation from the antimatter engine are solved.
In fact, it may not be possible for intelligent life to reach the stars in human form at all. A spacecraft capable of carrying humans, even if they were somhow made dormant (i.e. hibernation) would require FAR more mass than one with a payload of some sort of distributed computing hardware.
Essentially, the intelligence being carried would be distributed across a big matrix of molecular computers. All important information and processes would be duplicated hundreds of times (with peta bytes of molecular memory this would be no big deal) so that the radiation would not interfere with function.
Ideally, the system would be self repairing.
As for sending human personalties : one of the quirks of quantum information storage is that one cannot copy information without destroying the original. So it would not really be a copy of yourself that was being sent : it would be you, for all practical purposes (because to "upload" your personality would in all circumstances require destroying the original).
I can't help wondering whether they took the fact that clocks run differently in different gravities into account in their calculations - because the jets fly at a height that may have a (however small) contribution to the slowing down due to lower gravity there.
Well, I don't know about that.
It might be inconsistent, though.
I can't believe slashdot doesn't even spell check their headlines.
Yeah, this is worth losing some karma over. It's about time for you to integrate ispell into slashdot, CmdrTaco!
Sorry, no, I don't have the skills to do that. However, I don't run a popular website.
If you could be told what you can see or read, then it follows that you could be told what to say or think - BoC
As I recall, Paul Dirac (Nobel laureate in physics) proved back in the 30s that the gravity 'constant' is decreasing as well.
Robert Heinlein wrote a non-fiction piece on Dirac that mention this, and that piecewas included in the collection 'Expanded Universe' published in the 1970s, so I assume it was still not disproven then.
Anyone know the current status or real story on this?
Article quote:
"Mathematically, there were two possible reasons for this - either the electric charge of the electrons had increased, or the speed of light had fallen.
Using Stephen Hawking's formula for black hole thermodynamics, Davies, Davis and Lineweaver ruled out the electric charge possibility. By adapting Hawking's formula, they determined that an increase in electric charge would break the second law of thermodynamics, which says energy can only flow from hot spots to cold spots.
"That's illegal. It would be like a cup of coffee sitting on your desk getting hotter," Lineweaver says.
Observation -- but didn't they just prove that something "illegal" -- that the constant speed of light is changing -- is actually happening? Perhaps they should examine their logic on this point, because it seems to me it could be either. Or perhaps I should read the original article, where they probably address this issue.
Unlimited growth == Cancer.
Actually this is now new. There were many varying measurements to the speed of light until the invention of the atomic clock. Time in testing it was done comparing it to an atomic clock. Since atomic decay is losing of energy and energy is related to the speed of light, it wasn't noticed in recent years because the atomic decay is proportionate to the speed of light.
I guess there really is a physical cap on Moore's Law.
The speed of light is only so fast... and it's only going to get worse.
sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f(q{sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f});
How does that take into account the distance? That might be nice for almost considering to apply it to hubbles law (to a creation scientist) but, if the stars are already billions of light years away, how does light slowing down apply to that?
This is my sig. The post is over.
I just read that headline as "Speed of Light Incontinent?", and thought "Well why doesn't it eat more fiber?". Time to go to bed.
Tastes like burning! - Ralph Wiggum
I am member of that educated crowd (Ph.D. candidate in Chemistry, specializing in protein structure and biochemistry, not that anybody cares) who has a negative reaction to what the creationists put out but that's becuase when I was younger I spent about a year reading their books and tracts and comparing them to mainstream evolutionary books and papers while debating the matter on a local BBS. I was able to debunk everything that was thrown at me then and it's rather sad that your 20 questions by Dr. Brown (Ph.D. in mechanical engineering, a discipline not noted for its rigorous requirements in evolutionary or for that matter any biology) is the exact same as the stuff I waded through and debunked ten years ago. As for the Bombardier beetle, check here for the actual truth of the matter. Actually, read the whole talkorigins site to get what is currently believed in evolutionary biology rather than the strawmen arguments that have been fed to you by creationists. Although personal experience tells me that creationists never change their position no matter how much evidence is presented to them or how badly their arguments and even their champions are crushed please surprise me by being different and holding that "critical view" that you believe is lacking in us supporters of evolution.
One more thing: scientists are trained to be skeptical. It's our job to take a critical view of everything we read no matter what journal it got published in or who wrote it. Evolution is still the prevailing view because of its merits not because of some vast conspiracy or adherance to the status quo because if you can't ask original quesitons and attempt to find the answers you're not doing science; this is the very definition of breaking the status quo.
The theory goes that the decay of light is exponential, so if light were significantly faster near creation, it could reach earth in 6000-7000 years. But at current speeds it would appear to have taken much more time.
Degaussing scares the bad magnetism out of the monitor and fills it with good karma.
Remember that this is based on observations of Quasars. There are several alternative theories to explain the apparent red shift of Quasars. Here's one of them.
These theories claim that Quasars are much closer and less bright than currently assumed. Needless to say, if any of these alternative theories are correct the speed of light may not need any adjustments, after all.
Stop worrying about the risks of nuclear power and start worrying about the risks of not using nuclear power.
From the article: ``If the speed of light was close to infinity immediately after the Big Bang....''
WTF is "close to infinity"? I'm not a mathematician, so maybe that's the problem, but I cannot parse this statement....
moto411.com
I was debating a creationist friend of mine a while back, and she pulled out the old "speed-of-light-decreasing" thing to explain how we can see things millions of year away. I then went on to explain to her that there's no evidence of that and to make up something just so your theory would work was horribly bad science. Man... I hope to never debate that topic with her again :)
--Justin Mitchell
"2nd Place is a fancy word for losing" --Bender (Futurama)
I am surprised therefore to find now that it is also because the experiments are being repeated as part of the process.
Many papers appear to be the results of experiments with long timeframes, or which arise in the course of program of work or may be based on data that is not commonly available.
Perhaps in your field it is possible to repeat experiments at low or no cost in a short timeframe but I can't see how a significant proportion of peer reviewed articles have had their underlying experimental work repeated in the review (especially in Physics).
Besides, we know that anything that tacks on "science" to its name is the farthest from being one -- cf. creation science, political science, and (ba-da-bing!) computer science.
Hmm.... decisions, decisions.... defend the status quo? Or become a blithering moron?Unlimited growth == Cancer.
Unlimited growth == Cancer.
What is the unique, finite, multiplicitive set of prime numbers that 1 can be reduced to?
anyway, just thought I'd cast some shadows, given the posts on top of posts that are a bit off...
Congress wouldn't know a "meter" if it shoved itself up their butts... sideways.
Better change that to 182,000 yards per second, just to be on the safe side. And hey, if that slows down light, so be it. Light should have to follow our laws anyways.
Whoever stated that signature sizes should be limited to one hundred and twenty characters can just go ahead and kiss my
However the speed of lint continues to accelerate.
Along with the speed of spam it would seem.
I've experiments to run, there is research to be done on the people who are still alive.
Dirty Bombs don't rely on E=mc^2 at all... A dirty bomb is just a conventional exposive with radioactive stuff in it.. so when it blows up, the radioactive stuff is spread over a large area, poisoning a bunch of people. It's when the terrorists build (or buy) a real nuke, that we have to worry about E=mc^2.
Whoever stated that signature sizes should be limited to one hundred and twenty characters can just go ahead and kiss my
Interestingly, the DU model starts off with Einstein's original assumption of a 4-dimensional space (where our space is a 3-dimensional surface). Einstein decided to interpret the fourth (radial) dimension as time to avoid the idea of an expanding universe, because it was thought static at the time.
However, one main reason why DU has been developed, is that the calculations are much simpler and more intuitive than in GR. For instance, it explains _why_ space is curved by mass, while GR only tells how much.
--
If you moderate this, then your children will be next.
In any case, I don't just have a Ph.D.; I also am a Doctor of Divinity! Go visit the Universal Life Church -- for a mere $25 you could be one too! (It's free to become a regular "Reverend" -- and you can become one on the web site.)
Unlimited growth == Cancer.
Especially the part about the speed of light being near infinite at the start of the big bang. If the speed of light is determined by how fast the discrete components that make up the universe can be updated, it would make sense that 'c' slows as the universe expands. Since the state of all parts that can 'observe' each other must be update each 'turn' , this update gets slower as the universe gets bigger. When the universe was infinitesimally small, the update was almost instantaneous, so near infinite speed is possible.
---------- God doesn't answer prayers for the same reason that Santa doesn't deliver presents.
Mathematica 4.1 for Linux
Copyright 1988-2000 Wolfram Research, Inc.
-- Motif graphics initialized --
In[1]:= PrimeQ[1]
Out[1]= False
In[2]:=
taken! (by Davidleeroth) Thanks Bingo Foo!
One is the identity under multiplication just as Zero is the identity under addition (group theory).
As far as the "unique prime factors" explanation goes, since One is the identity, every number must have, in addition to its prime factors, an infinite series of 1s (as the identity, not a prime), as valid factors.
Zero and One are "special cases", because their properties lead to either infinites or contraditions. It makes as much sense to discuss whether One is prime or not as to discuss the actual value resulting from division-by-zero (outside the Aleph sets, that is).
All the patent clerks are sitting at home trying to think about new fundamental theories of the universe...
Pimping my Karma Whore since 1847.
Photons can't be subdivided.
Light travels at a constants velocity
The earth is flat
Particles can be in more than one place at once, until you look at them.
All the same stuff, people will convince themselves of the most ludicrous things with ever more complicated theories.
This (Quantum Physics) is no different from Geology prior to Plate Tectonics, or World modelling in 'flat earth' times.
yeah, if you want the *peace* nobel price! For the real one you should contact the nobel commitie in Sweden...
When I was young, I always wondered if the "constants" of the universe might vary across space and time. Turns out I was right, at least in some limited way.
Let me dig into my past a little more and see if I came up with any other brilliant publishable ideas. Let's see. Monsters under bed. Think Nature would take that one? Mom and Dad are Gods. That's some hardcore theology there. I was a walking intellectual rebellion.
Maybe the state's highest function is to grind out insoluble problems. (Zelazny, Hall of Mirrors)
1 is prime, 3 is prime, 5 is prime, 7 is prime, 9 is ... *picks up phone, dials KGB* "Hello? Yes, I need you to go out and burn all of the addresses down that have a 9 in them. Yes. Thanks.", 11 is prime, 13 is prime...
5 years later...
Teacher: "And thus, clearly, all odd numbers are prime."
Student: "What about 9?"
Teacher: "Have you seen a 9 anywhere?"
Student: "Er, no."
Teacher: "Then all odd numbers are prime. Let's continue..."
Maybe the state's highest function is to grind out insoluble problems. (Zelazny, Hall of Mirrors)
If this is true then filling in to solve for E=mc2, the mass of the universe must be increasing since theoretically the energy level stays constant (or does it?). So, not only do we get slower, but we also get fatter as we get older...
Don't forget; Terraform Venus by moving it to a new orbit.
Yes. If you took one of the clocks and left it absolutely stationary in space until we did a lap of the galaxy there would be more than a few billionths of a second difference.
If you sneeze on a train the boogers leave your nose at a fair old speed! It's not too fast compared to the speed of the train, or the speed of rotation of the earth etc.... but the guy oposite will still get pretty pissed if you hit him!
we're just in a computer programm and the developers are simply tweaking a few parameters every now and then
Quite a few philosophers of Science (most, IIRC), will argue that all scientific theories are wrong. They may be approximations that work most/all of the time, but history has shown that perfect prediction with current technology will be followed by new experiments with new technology that prove the old theory. We end up in a continuous situation where the correctness of our theories is limited by the sophistication of the supporting experiments.
Hold on. I'm not done yet.
The creatonists evolution show what poor scientists they are by attempting to debunk evolution. Fine. Assume evolution is wrong. However, creatonists are continuously failing to show conclusive evidence that their theory is correct. We are then (given that the creatonists are right in some of their contrary evidence) in the situation where neither party is right, but both parties claim to be right. See - the creatonists are just as ulnerable. If we give conclusive proof that some of their theories are wrong, they would by their own reasoning be forced to abandon creationism altogether.
Stop the brainwash
When the planes landed, the scientists found what they were hoping for: The clocks on the high-speed journeys were ticking a few billionths of a second behind their stationary friends.
Motion, it turns out, slows time - one of the funny effects of the law of relativity. At low speeds, the effect is slight and makes no difference to our daily lives.
The article is wrong. As far I remember abck the clocks in the planes were running infront of the clocks on earth. Why? They moved? Yes thats a special relativistic effect, but there is a second, the general relativity. Time flows slower near masses, and since the planes fly at 10.000km or so above the earth they are further away from the eart mass, so flowing faster. Yes these two effects work against each other, but as I recall the general time increasing effect was stronger in this case.
--
Karma 50, and all I got was this lousy T-Shirt.
Tell me when they can travel at the speed of Bad News, then I'll be interested! (cluebat: that was a joke)
Free Mac Mini Yeah, it's
Oh i see... but wouldn't that mean that the stars were created very quickly, and placed billions of *current* light years away a few thousand years ago? That wouldn't rule out stellar evolution.
This is my sig. The post is over.
Does that principle apply to atomic clocks? I would think not, but I'm not 100% sure.
There has been much brouhaha in the past 4 years about an apparent increase in the rate of expansion of the universe. (Type I-A supernovae in distant galaxies look redder than they ought to.)
Is there a relationship here? Could this fine structure deviation account for the anomalous supernova spectra?
"Genius may have its limitations, but stupidity is not thus handicapped." --Elbert Hubbard (1856-1915)
It's not science.
They have a critical view in the sense of criticism. Yes, creationists disagreed with the notion that species changed slowly over long periods of time. But their alternative was that there is no evolutionary change at all, not that evolution has rapid and slow phases.
Irreducable complexity is a crock. "I don't know how it could have happened." is not a proof of Intelligent Design, it is a proof of the lack of imagination.
Read 15 Answers to Creationist Nonsense from Scientific American.
I have discovered a truly marvelous sig, unfortunately the sig limit is too small to contain i
Exactly, if you're all powerful you can create stars at various stages of development. Adam & Eve weren't created as babies. Other creationist explinations are that time is not constant either, if light slowed down so could time. Finally, there are some who interpret a large gap between Gen. 1:1 and Gen. 1:3, when the earth was void.
Degaussing scares the bad magnetism out of the monitor and fills it with good karma.
(a) repeating experiments is not the duty of the referee (yes, you get a list of things you should do when reviewing). Actually, repeating an experiment takes much more time, effort, and money than a referee could ever afford. Repeating an experiment of this size requires several man-years (and the money to pay for the job).
(b) as a referee you can, and should, watch out for bad style, bad grammar/spelling, and obscure or needlessly complex wording. you should also watch out for inconsistencies, and/or conclusions that are not supported by the facts given.
(c) repeating the experiment, and judging on the validity of the results, is the responsibility of the scientific community as a whole. If it is important, someone will step up and repeat it.
(d) the difference between submitted date and published date is due to a combination of lazy referees, lazy authors (resubmitting the paper months after receiving the referees comments), and publication backlog.
"On October, 1971, American physicists took four super-accurate atomic clocks, kept two on the ground and put two on commercial jets flying at 1000 kmh in opposite directions around Earth.
When the planes landed, the scientists found what they were hoping for: The clocks on the high-speed journeys were ticking a few billionths of a second behind their stationary friends.
Motion, it turns out, slows time "
Did these guys never consider that perhaps, motion rather than slowing time, just slows atomic clocks? After all, the clock doesn't know it's a device for measuring time does it?
Certainly it does - that's how it was veryfied, after all.
If it didn't apply to clock X (whatever X may be, maybe the next generation clock working on the yet-to-discover principle of Y), General Relativity would be disproven by that fact.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
Looks like Dark Helmet was right, light speed is too slow. :)
what are you people thinking?
I repeat: One is not prime!!
Prime numbers are numbers that have no other factors than 1 and itself, and the number one is a special case.
(So basically the number "1" can be used to disprove the hypothesis that all numbers are prime)
Don't quote me on this.
For grins, what kind of delta v--or delta a--do we need to accord with creation in 6 days per the book of Genesis? There were stabs at this 21 years ago:
http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/c-decay.html
It would be nice to make the clocks at work run faster so I could get relatively more rest on the Sabbath...
The Bible tells me that God created the heavens and the earth. The scientists tell me how He did it. I've never really seen what the big deal was...
Thomas Galvin
Keep in mind that just because one scientist defends his theory badly doesn't mean the theory is wrong. It merely means that the argument must be thrown out. If you look at the two articles, it seems that those arguments that could be shown to be wrong were thrown out.
The article you mention referred only to 38 points of data. The first, however, used over a hundred. Also, he only made the claim that the speed of light has decreased, and did not discuss how, which was the major way that Setterfield was shown wrong.
Finally, he gave a lot of verifiable supporting evidence - all known cases where the speed of light was measured using heavenly bodies, and the difference between orbital and atomic clocks, which I would say is the real "proof" of his case.
I am doubtful of his answer. However, your attempt to discredit him leaves more to be desired.
Mod me down and I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine!
From the article:
In October, 1971, American physicists took four super-accurate atomic clocks, kept two on the ground and put two on commercial jets flying at 1000 kmh in opposite directions around Earth. When the planes landed, the scientists found what they were hoping for: The clocks on the high-speed journeys were ticking a few billionths of a second behind their stationary friends.
I know this sounds like I'm being ridiculous but I'm pretty sure one of the clocks was a little ahead. I remember reading this in a modern physics textbook in college. Unfortunately, I can't immediately find any reference on the web, so verifying this will be left as an excercise to the reader.
The fact that they were both behind is a common misconception. Around the time that I read this, a professor who was visiting and who was well known to the department gave a talk showing how Enstein's relativity is incomplete, etc., etc. and used the clocks on the airplanes as an example. Unfortunately, this kind of blatant ignoring of phenomena happens all the time in science. In other words, if the dominant theory doesn't provide an adequate explanation, it must not exist.
I could go on a rant about how this happens even in medicine with doctors ignoring any condition for which there is not a pill but I'll just stop there. Anyway, I believe we'll see more holes being poked in relativity in the coming years.
Imagine a large spacecraft traveling with a positive, but constant, velocity that was rotating in a vector orthogonal to its direction of travel. Two experiments that measure the speed of light to a high degree of accuracy are performed onboard the spacecraft; one at some distance away from the axis of rotation of the spacecraft and the other on the axis of rotation. Two observers that are very sensitive to red and blue shifts in light (due to the Doppler effect) are also on board, one by each experiment.
One observer, Alice, travels in the same portion of the spacecraft as the equipment and at the same velocity as the equipment, thus having zero velocity in the frame of reference of the equipment. However, due to rotation about the axis of the spacecraft, her (and the experiment's) frame of reference experiences time in a non-linear fashion (due to their non-constant speed with respect to the absolute frame of reference). Note that the speed of light measured in the experiment (relative to the Alice's frame of reference) changes depending on her instantaneous absolute velocity (and speed). Also note that Alice would not observe a blue or red shift in the equipment, since she has the same frame of reference as the experment and experiences time at the same rate.
The other observer, Bob, is positioned on the axis of rotation of the spacecraft and has the same frame of reference as the spacecraft. If Bob runs the same experiment as Alice, but the equipment is set up at on the axis of rotation of the spacecraft, Bob would measure the same value for the speed of light in his experiment as long as the velocity of the spacecraft remained constant. Bob would alternately observe red shifts and blue shifts when viewing Alice and her experiment. Likewise, Alice would alternately see blue and red shifts when viewing Bob and his experiment.
The red and blue shifts are due to relativity and the Doppler effect. Since their absolute velocities are changing, the light gets "bunched up" or "spread out" when leaving from an object in motion, depending on whether it is emitted from the side of the object that is in the direction of its absolute motion. When Alice's absolute velocity has a component that is the same as the velocity of the spacecraft, the light she is emitting toward's Bob is "bunched", or blue shifted. When here absolute velocity has a component that is the oposite as the velocity of the spacecraft, light she emits toward Bob is "spread out", or red shifted.
I propose that we are in the same situation as Alice the observer, that is, traveling at the same rate as the experiment setup. Our visible portion of the universe corresponds to Alice and her experiment and has a similar frame of reference. The axis of rotation of the spacecraft corresponds to an axis of rotation in our universe that is beyond our visible universe. Since we can't determine the absolute velocity of anything within our field of view, there is no way to determine whether our rate of experiencing time is constant relative to the absolute frame of reference of the universe.
The absolute frame of reference of the universe would be the frame of reference that has the maximum speed of light. Since models of the universe that have a big bang event nicely condense all matter into a small area, it is easy to imagine a point in the absolute frame of reverence--one that has all the matter with zero velocity. In that frame of reference, the speed of light as emmitted and measured within that frame of reference would be the maximum out of all possible frame of references that have light being emitted and measured.
science is a religion
Face facts - evolution AND creation are more than just theories. The answer to these questions will be fundamentally more than just "how old is the earth?". It will address whether there is a God, whether there is an afterlife or not, whether this life has any meaning, and much more. Our whole life stands to be turned around by this question.
Not really. This would be true if you based your entire worldview on a rather old book. For those of us that don't, it's merely another way to look at how we got here. Using evidence and critical thought.
This is not just a question of science, but a question of our entire life direction and purpose.
This is probably why you can't make any progress. See first paragraph.
Ocean basins were created and the waters receded into them.
How many times does "created" come up in your arguments? Is this why it is called "creation" science, the answer to "why" is always "it was created"? You are skipping the "how" part of the question, and jumping straight to "why". Science tends to focus on "how" and religion jumps to "why". This is another reason you make little progess in your forum debates.
Evolution took the world by storm. It won by popularity contest even before there was evidence for it, just Charles Darwin's hypotheses. The world was ready to hear it and they grabbed onto it.
Similar to how Christianity and Islam did, no? People know a good idea when they see one.
+&x
That makes sense... in an arbitrary yet convenient kind of way.
Personally, I would prefer that prime numbers include one, even though mathematicians would have to say "prime numbers other than one" a lot more often than "prime numbers."
Speed of light... decreasing...
E=mc^2....
E... decreasing....
m... another form of E...
m... decreasing...
cosmological constant.. not constant; decreasing...
less matter, less energy...
Both Big Bang theory versions incorrect, the universe is neither expanding infinitely, nor is it periodically collapsing and expanding....
One Big Bang, matter/energy dissipates..
Conservation laws gone...
Universe... will soon be gone...
Brain hurts now
No more thinky today
-- "Government is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else."
It seems Einstein was an Aussie too.
Hmm, I wonder how this is going to make my beer taste?
Do you mind, your karma has just run over my dogma.
so if light were significantly faster near creation, it could reach earth in 6000-7000 years. But at current speeds it would appear to have taken much more time.
The problem is, you can't muck with the speed of light without mucking with a lot of other things. If the speed of light were really that fast 6000 years ago, stars probably couldn't have formed anyway.
*sigh* RIP, you old crank
Ahhh, Alexander Abian.
All this creationist thing is abnoxiously wrong. Stars would not have time to form in 7K years, speed of light is not the only way to measure this. Just as man was already homo-sapiens-sapiens 7K years ago, not dropped in "as is", that's not me, that's carbon 13 and all the skulls people find that say it. Speed of light may vary, well, cool, that is kinda expectable anyway. Every theory varies with time too (but creationists....ok), and having the speed of light varying is part of a trend in physics where the guys want to vary the well known constants such as speed of light or gravity. That's also a way to try to figure out why things are the way they are. The light slow down could only happen in condition where you would not be able to think anyway - a few billion degrees, with a density a few billionth of billionth the current density of the universe - you would not be proton-sized yet. Thank to the law of physics Arbitrage is cool, but nature has no mercy ;-)
since that was the only point I saw you try and make. If you'd like to re-iterate your point, I'd be glad to wear it down to a nub, yet again.
+&x
Yes, this theory does have some predictions. Such as the entire atmosphere and hydrosphere of the planet boiling into space. And the rheology of the mantle being entirely different from that observed today. And all the seafloor being the same depth regardless of radiometric age.
I know the creationist position. It's called lie, evade, build strawmen, never make predictions that can be tested, take quotes out of context, and generally try to decieve the gullable and misinformed.