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Scientists Question Laws of Nature
mknewman writes "MSNBC is reporting that scientists are finding differences in many of the current scientific 'constants' including the speed of light, alpha (the fine structure constant of the magnetic force), the ratio of proton to electron mass and several others. These findings were made by observing quasars and comparing the results to tests here on the earth." From the article: "Time-varying constants of nature violate Einstein's equivalence principle, which says that any experiment testing nuclear or electromagnetic forces should give the same result no matter where or when it is performed. If this principle is broken, then two objects dropped in a gravitational field should fall at slightly different rates. Moreover, Einstein's gravitational theory -- general relativity -- would no longer be completely correct, Martins says."
For example, Ohm's Law is much more interesting at a sub-microscopic levels
If we don't fight for ourselves no one will.
This is a good thing. One of two things will happen from this
:If option (1) is true, it means we're entering that sort of post-Einsteinian "What the hell's going on here" phase in science, where we have a theory that we thought is good and we have some measurements which we also know are good and conflict with the theory. This will lead to lots more experiments being done and allow us to invent hyperspace faster.
If option (2) is true, it means that the scientists in question will be metaphorically shot by the scientific community for daring to question the great reletivity laws, and remove bad scientists from the community.
It's a win-win!There is nothing interesting going on at my blog
The lorenz attractor is a mathematical example of how sensitivity to initial conditions can affect the results of any test.
There is no way that ANY test can be reproduced perfectly multiple times, however for a large percentage of things tested the differences are so small they are negligable.
If you take a double pendulum and try (to scientific precision) to orient the beams to the exact location the results will be different every single time you do it (fluctuations in the universes' gravitational field caused by me farting or a butterfly flapping its wings for instance).
liqbase
Sometimes in astronomy, the handling in errors (both random and systematic) is sloppily done. The random error is probably done ok; but how about systematic ones?
In an attempt to publish hastily, scientists often willingfully ignore some shortcomings in instrumetal calibration, etc., and may not take into account all the uncertainties that should be propagated through their calculations. I hope that those astronomers are not embarrassing themselves by making an error like that.
Oh, it's worse than that. The quasars are different distances away. How do we figure out how far away they are? By measuring the redshift in the frequencies of their spectra. What do we use for that? The relativistic Doppler formula. What is the key constant in the Doppler formula? The speed of light. Actualy, it's even worse, because it's not the naive Doppler formula but one that includes cosmological effects which are not independently observable.
In other words, the distance of the quasars -- and the frequency their light "should" be -- are highly model-dependent.
There's less to this story than meets the eye.
The Mongrel Dogs Who Teach
Isn't general relativity incorrect for sub atomic particles anyway? ....it's been like 10 years since my last quantum physics class.
ÕÕ
From the blurb:
Time-varying constants of nature violate Einstein's equivalence principle, which says that any experiment testing nuclear or electromagnetic forces should give the same result no matter where or when it is performed.
Maybe there is a hidden assumption in there. Maybe space itself isn't constant.
We're already thinking that space may have an energy to it. If it has energy, then space would have an equivalent mass. Possibly you could describe that as a density of sorts.
So if space itself has a sort of density, then maybe the slight differences you see in the constants are caused by the varying density of different regions of space they are traveling through to be measured.
IANAP, YMMV, etc. But I think it might be at least possible. Einstein's principle above would have to be edited to say "in equivalent spaces".
That always seems to be the way of scientific progress. You create a set of equations describing what you see, like Newton did. Then someone can see a little farther, and amend them like Einstein did. Another amendment wouldn't be "questioning the laws of nature", it would just simply be understanding them a little better.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
It's worth noting that none of the results described in TFA have actually been confirmed, that they are in fact recent and highly contested, and that many such claims in the past were subsequently retracted or refuted. There is a minor bandwagon on "variable constants", actually; everybody and their brother is measuring physical constants, and pointing at any minor statistical fluctuation way out at the edges of detectability as "evidence of variation".
The implications would be very interesting if any of these claims panned out (which is why it's so popular to make claims like this in the literature), and there are theories in which some of these "constants" are indeed allowed to vary, but we'll need to wait years to see if followup experiments determine that any of these effects are real. Personally, I'm skeptical that any of the specific constants discussed have been proven variable by any of the experiments mentioned in the TFA. I'm not saying the experimentalists are incompetent, but the reported effects are so hard to measure that the effect may just go away after a few more independent checks; this has happened a lot in the literature.
... thinks most of the so-called "laws of nature" are more like habits. Here's his essay on The Variability of Fundamental Constants.
the closer you get to measuring a small event, the more the attempt to measure it gets in the way.
also called the "uncertainty principle."
there is a good chance that all these differing microerrors in all sorts of differing directions are different diffractions through inteference in what we can observe, thus proving the heisenberg principle has raised its ugly head again.
aka don't sweat it until you get a couple thousand indicators in the same direction. just like this week's surprise medical discovery that pesticides cure cancer, or coffee cures cancer, or coffee cures pesticides, or whatever bogus wrong-way publication made it into print on one limited study. the last line of those articles always reads, "The findings suggest that further studies in the field should be undertaken," which is code for "The previous article was written to get more grant money, send to PO Box 666, Unterderlinden, NJ."
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
Yes, it predicted a number of cool particles, and sure enough, there they are. It also craps out more and more lately. Neutrinos oscillate, huh? Uh, well, we'll fix that later. Gravity... yeah. That's a bitch. I know! More free variables! We're at 19 now, what's 10 more?
This whole thing smacks of turn-of-the-20th-century Newtonians trying to cobble together a decent explanation for black-body radiators. They tried all kinds of tricks--turns out they didn't work, because the system is not Newtonian. Newtonian physics was awesome for predicting meso-scale behavior, but it's a dog at small and large scales. Similarly, I think, the Standard Model was super-dynamite for a good number of years, but to hang on to it through all these issues should be a red flag that something else might be a better explanation. Kuhn, here we come.
blarg.
Yeah, I noticed the same thing. In one sense it's kind of irritating to have the insinuation perpetrate the myth that scientists have a non-rational belief equivalent to a religious belief, and that these scientsts are some kind of heretics. We know what they meant, but still...
A more precise headline is somewhat harder to write: "Scientists find evidence that they may have to refine or even refactor some really, really well-demonstrated theories" isn't nearly as punchy.
(Scientists do, in fact, have non-rational fundamentally held beliefs, but they're nothing so simple as "Einstein was right, Darwin was right". Trying to convince somebody that a scientist's real religious belief is "The universe has some sort of fundamental, objective, and probably comparatively simple law, one that we can understand or at least produce successively more acurate approximations, one that can be modeled mathematically and is true over all space and time, one that makes predictions that can be tested and will stand up to all such tests all the time" is rather more complicated and less fun. And yes, I recognize that my approximation of that belief above is both more complicated and less accurate than some other formulations, but I'm already drifting dangerously off-topic.)
One of my hypothesis from high school was that all of the "laws" we've found to be true for our planet, may not hold true when applied arcoss the universe. The problem is that we're observing too small of a sample size. Our planet is a mere spec when compared to the total of all masses in existance.
Chances are, the laws we now know are correct... but only when applied to our planet. The displacement caused by the earth is what gives us gravity. Should the displacement of the Earth be altered by either adding or subtracting large amounts of high density molecules, then the gravity would also shift. The laws of science will only hold true when the variables being measures are the same. ie - The speed that light travels given our displacement will yield different results than the speed light travels when given a different displacement (namely, a quazar).
Is the sky blue?
Yes.
Why?
(source) [quote] The blue color of the sky is due to Rayleigh scattering. As light moves through the atmosphere, most of the longer wavelengths pass straight through. Little of the red, orange and yellow light is affected by the air. However, much of the shorter wavelength light is absorbed by the gas molecules. The absorbed blue light is then radiated in different directions. It gets scattered all around the sky. Whichever direction you look, some of this scattered blue light reaches you. Since you see the blue light from everywhere overhead, the sky looks blue.[/quote]
Yet if we were to observe the same sky from outer space, the same princinple does not apply. Now the sky is blue because you are looking down on many large bodies of water.
Perception is 9/10 of reality.
However, if physical constants such a the speed of light are variable, based on the expansion of the universe and the distance from the initial point of expansion, then the light from those quasars has perhaps sped up or slowed down since being released. While we may be looking into the past, a variable speed of light would mean we don't know how far into the past. This brings up the question of relativity, since not only would an observer see something different at one point A, than another would see at point B, but now neither observer could be sure if what the other is seeing is invariant compared to what they have seen. Both might use the same formula to calculate mass increase as a function of velocity, but inherent to that equation is "c" and if both observers have different local values for "c", then their answers will not be the same and they will not be seeing exactly the same thing. It makes for interesting nightmares.
GetOuttaMySpace - The Anti-Social Network
This is an old problem with science put forth by David Hume. In order for science to work the future must be like the past and the past must be like the present observations. Any "constants" found by observing a finite part of the universe and applying it to the whole may be problematic, yet we are willing to jump into the metaphysics of "and yet it MUST be so!" from our observations and ingenious models that seem to work so very well. Now, it does work very very well because you can build a remarkably functional rocket based on our laws of science, so on a pragmatic level science is an exceptionally solid epistemology. But the metaphysics are the problem, if you care to take metaphysics into the equation. The engineers designing a functional rocket don't. And I consider myself a pragmatist, so let them build a better mousetrap even if they mistakenly call them "laws". }8^)>
Yes, but what the article is saying is that if things like the speed of light aren't constants, then the light from those stars may have been traveling here at differing speeds.
All of the sudden our yardstick is broken, because if the speed of light isn't really constant, then two stars which seem to be the same distance away might actually be two very different distances away from us.
If light from a closer star came at a slower speed compared to light from a far star, then they may seem to be the same distance away from the earth.
Or if the speed of light changes over time, then light from one star may have traveled quite a distance longer than we thought to get here while light from another, newer star may have traveled less distance at a slower speed. The light from the two stars may lead us to believe that the two stars were similar distances away, when one was drastically older and drastically farther away.
Albuquerque PC
Oh, but it's even worse than THAT... recent observations that the vacuum is *not* purely empty, but apparently seething with energy, give rise to a modern, quantum mechanical confirmation of the 19th century concept of that sacreligious word: the (a)ether. But, modelled as a matrix of quantum particles (muons, in this case), it is possibly palatable to modern science. How can this be relevant, you ask? When one models physics BASED on this matrix of quanta, all kinds of things that are currently mysteries become clear. Like for example, the observation that redshift is quantized. That, along with other observations, give lie to the fact that Doppler redshift of star spectra is *ONLY* due to distance and speed. Which means that all astronomical distances recorded and marked based on redshift alone, vs. parallax measurements, fall under new scrutiny. And which allows for areas of the universe (like the high-energy surrounds of quasars) that have a higher energy density than our local galactic neighborhood. And these higher energy domains have "ether" concentrations that will affect what? You guessed it: the speed of light, the fine structure constant, the cosmological constant, and the value of G, the gravitational constant.
Actually, it's his Theory of General Relativity. Even Einstien said it was imperfect and incorrect for all things. He was looking for a Theory of Specific Relativity, but that eluded him as it has all others since then. String theory is the latest greatest attempt at specific relativity, but it doesn't hold water every time either, nor does quantum mechanics, although both are pretty close.
There are some other things that can be used to guesstimate quasar distances - for just one, gravitational lensing effects accumulate if there are more galaxise between us and the observed quasar, and so the quasars with the most complex total lensing are likely to also be exceptionally far. (The comparison would be a statistical average methodology for a laege sample of quasars, rather than serving to predict distances for any individual quasar). There are probably enough observations already on record to compare total lensing complexity with the doppler formula predictions with pre-existing data, and it shouldn't be too calculation intensive. (Just imagine a Beowulf Cluster of old cheap boxes, six months actual processing, and a grad student looking for a good doctoral thesis). I wouldn't be at all surprised if this has already been done.
Offhand, there are probably also different ratios for the really high energy cosmic rays emitted (Particularly cosmic rays over the theoretical maximum predicted for an extra galactic source) These last have been observed coming from extra galactic sources such as quasars. The theoretical maximum is known as the Greisen-Zatsepin-Kuzmin limit, and is derived from GR. It's a puzzle for cosmologists that the GZK limit doesn't match real world observations, but I don't know if anyone has actually matched sources with other distance prediction methods on a large scale. Cosmics over the GZK limit are rare, but not ultra rare events, and it may take a decade or so to amass enough data to be able to draw significant conclusions, but more data gathering here would probably give us some distance checks on the relativistic doppler method faster than it will explain the failure of GZK itself.
Who is John Cabal?
If this principle is broken, then two objects dropped in a gravitational field should fall at slightly different rates.
Only if the physical constants are different for the two objects. If, within the context in which they fall, the constants are the same, the objects will drop at the same rate. The experiments show that these constants vary over extreme amounts of time, with no proof as of yet that they vary over distance.
*** *** You're just jealous 'cause the voices talk to me... ***
welcome our new (in)constant overlords or would if quantum mechanics allowed me to state what they were and when and where at the same time.
What I took away from the field of physics so far was that constant variables are bunk and largely a matter of fudging. The important constants are actually the formulaic and thus geometric relationships between the variables. Such as E=mc^2. If c is variable then with a factor n,
E=m((nc)^2) which amounts to E=(m/(n^2))((n^2)(c^2))
So for energy to remain the same without violations, as the local speed of light increases, mass must decrease.
I don't believe and never have that the individual value constants are constant but subject to the spacetime fabric and its conditions.
If my grammar and spelling are off, I am [distracted/tired/careless] (take your pick)