Fundamental Constant Possibly Inconsistent

dylanduck writes "Cosmologists have begun thinking that yet another fundamental constant of nature is, er, not constant. The constant in question is the ratio of a proton's mass to that of an electron. It governs the strong nuclear force but there's no explanation for why that ratio should be constant. If true it would provide support for string theory, which predicts extra spatial dimensions." From the article: "Researchers at the Free University in Amsterdam in the Netherlands and the European Southern Observatory in Chile discovered the variation in mu. They did it by comparing the spectrum of molecular hydrogen gas in the laboratory to what it was in quasars 12 billion light years away. The spectrum depends on the relative masses of protons and electrons in the molecule."

Comments

Blah Blah Blah Scientist Words

[Dinglenuts]

Oof I am unable to comprehend a single sentence of this article. Blasted hangovers.

Problem of Induction

[abscissa]

According to the problem of induction (see Wikipedia we can never be sure about anything no matter how many times we observe it. For example, no matter how many times I observe that I am burned when I touch a candle flame, I cannot be 100% certain that if I go to China in a month and touch a candle flame there, I will be burned by it. Solving this seeming impossibility is a major problem in philosophy and science.

This idea always seemed really silly to me. And beleieve it or not, I took an entire advanced level course on it in University. The entire reading for the half-year course was 80 pages.

However, in light of this article, it makes a bit more sense now. Universal "constants" may not be constant after all, but John Stewart Mill could have told us this ages ago :-)