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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.
I recall reading that as a universe expands or contracts, the constants would theoretically change to adjust to the expansion or contraction of the basic building blocks of matter.
Is it possible that the measuring instruments failed here? I thought that was always a possibility in observations. Is it also possible that the quasars we are observing are differing light years away and thus we are making observations based on data from several billion years ago (as the article states)?
Yes, I think that there is call for speculation on the constants varying over billions of years since the light we are observing is roughly 12 billion years old and all our observations here on earth remain static.
My work here is dung.
FTA:the quasar observations are sometimes interpreted as indicating that light was faster in the past,
They just don't make photons like they use to...
"We are all geniuses when we dream"
- E.M. Cioran
filthy law breaking unearthly quasars should be hunted down and expelled from the galaxy.
Old COBOL programmers never die. They just code in C.
For those wondering who "scientists" are, it's the Dharma crew.
I would recommend not flying/sailing for the next few months.
It doesn't take an Einstein to... aww crap.
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
Do you mean philote, or am I just missing something? Either way, physicists might object to your use of the word "we." :)
[b.belong('us') for b in bases if b.owner() == 'you']
Scientists Question Laws of Nature
Isn't "questioning laws of nature" by definition what scientists do? Question, hypothesis, experiment, theory, law, lather, rinse, repeat - right?
Web 2.0 == Giant Blogspam Circle Jerk
In my days we had to wait for the light to travel 1,000,000 miles in the snow, uphill, both ways, to measure it - and we LIKED it.
I never spellcheck and I freely admit it. Save your karma for more worthwhile "lol erorrs" replies
Doesn't the scientific method say that when the answers don't fit you need to ask why and go throught the steps again? I rember learning in my high school chemistry class that pv=nrt and my teacher said that higher levels of chemistry don't use that formula because it is just sort of a rough guide to gasses. If my chemistry teacher was right I would guess that scientists figured out the easy formula once and fine tuned it as they gained knowledge and better instruments.
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.
Apart from the time scale involved, this isn't all that new. Scientific American had an article on this over a year ago.
.. paranoid crackpot leftover from the days of Amiga.
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
Well.... yeah. That's their jeorb.
- For every action, there is an equal and opposite criticism.
Einstein's gravitational theory -- general relativity -- would no longer be completely correct, Martins says.
First of all, let me preface this by saying IAAP (I am a physicist):
All this talk of laws being "wrong" or no longer "correct" is just popular fluff the press either hypes or makes up.
No physical law is ever completely correct. A physical law is simply a description of reality to the degree to which we understand it, and is "correct" (i.e. produces predicitions which fit our measurements) within the realm of our present experience of the phenomenon it describes. As our understanding and experience of a phenomenon grows to encompass a wider range of circumstances (e.g. scale, velocity), the law needs to be either refined or replaced with new law, possibly based upon a new paradigm.
Newton's laws of motion are no less "correct" now than they ever were. Einstein determined that the realm in which they accurately described reality did not include large velocities near the speed of light (i.e. >0.1c). Quantum mechanics explained how at small scales these same rules no longer applied. Even today, no one yet knows how to reconcile the theories of relativity and quantum mechanics when their realms overlap--this is still pioneering work.
Yet Newton's laws are still taught as the foundation of physics to all new students because they are still valid within the realm or experience in which all of our normal lives are conducted. Models, and the laws derived with them, are valid only within the realm of experience within which they were formed (and, if the inventer is lucky, they hold even beyond that). And they remain valid within that realm even when we find later than they don't hold outside that realm. Even Aristotle's belief that heavier objects fall faster than light objects is valid to a point (within a realm where air friction is a significant contributor), even though Galileo later "proved" this was wrong (i.e. it is not a general law).
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.
Q: "Easy: Change the gravitational constant of the universe."
Geordi: "What?"
Q: "Change the gravitational constant of the universe, thereby altering the asteroid's orbit."
Geordi: "How do you do that?"
Q: "You just DO it, that's all..."
Data: "What Geordi is saying is that we do not have the ability to change the gravitational constant of the universe."
Q: "Well, then, you obviously never read slashdot."
Scientific theories form two main purposes: 1. They are useful at predicting how things will behave (e.g. important for NASA) 2. They provide a framework to show the way for future work. Einstein's axioms of constancy were constructs built from empirical evidence which yielded some interesting and very useful insights into the way things worked. They also showed potential paths forward which Einstein himself pursued until his death. Einstein himself knew his theories were not the last word and any scientist knows this is a fundamental philosophy of the scientific method. The rest of the world can pretend there is something else sensational going on if they want to but it isn't science.
Even the ones you think lead to a gaping abyss. You never know when there'll be an ore field on the way.
I'm tired of hearing people tell my friend from Georgia Tech that he can't develope a free energy device. The quantum model is far from perfect. It is entirely possible we could extract the [theories, now] ZPE (our gravitational like-force experienced in the casimir-effect) from empty space. Who are these people to comdemn him? How many of them went to Georgia Tech? Do they have the schematics and plans for a device for free energy? No. How would they know anything about it? Are they willing to fund him so he can build his? Even though that might prove them right, they're too busy running after their quantum smoke. They're no better than the Catholic Church railing on Galileo.
It's not so much "incorrect" as "impossible to test" or "irrelevant", because gravity is 17 orders of magnitude weaker than the strong, weak and electromagnetic forces which dominate at the atomic and subatomic scales.
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
I'm guessing that we can still count on Murphy's Law?
Only at pretty low redshift, though. At any redshift appreciably close to or greater than 1, there really isn't much meaning to "distance" --- would you interpret that distance to be at the time of emission, the time of detection, or somewhere in between? We basically just use the cosmological redshift, which says that the redshift z represents how much the universe has expanded since the radiation was emitted. That's it. Any "distance" or lookback time is model-dependent. Instead of measuring slight deviations in universal constants, they are perhaps measuring perturbations in a particular cosmological model.
In other words, the distance of the quasars -- and the frequency their light "should" be -- are highly model-dependent.
Right --- I'm just picking nits, since I've seen lots of confusion by others in similar reports.
in the post text you read:
"scientists are finding differences in many of the current scientific 'constants'"
in the article the sentence says:
"Recent research has found evidence that the value of certain fundamental parameters, such as the speed of light or the invisible glue that holds nuclei together, may have been different in the past."
whats the use if people cant tell the difference between MAY and ARE?
there is a big difference between "you MAY die this week" and "you ARE to die this week"
i know, its all relative, and i know what they meant... but you know what? thats not true. i opened this because i thought the may actually turned to an are... a possibliity realized. when i get there, its still may, and people cant even read basically.
This is really the crux of a measurement. How many assumptions from the model are used to make the measurement? In an ideal experiment, the measurement itself is what verifies or falsifies the model, but in reality there are usually other parameters that are needed as inputs to the experiment that are computed using the model, thus the model dependence. I'm in experimental high energy particle physics and we worry about this every day, and try to reduce the number of theoretical inputs needed to make sense of our data. I'm sure the astronomers do likewise, but sometimes inputs are unavoidable. This doesn't make the measurement invalid because a model should be self consistent as well. So if you correctly compute the inputs using the model, and your results still differ from the model then some double checking of everything needs to be done because the model is showing a flaw. The true size of the flaw is the really hard thing to quantify because all of the quatities are model-dependent. In the end this could turn out to be nothing or the start of something.
I welcome all chinks in scientific theories because it generally leads to new scientific understanding and a new round of theories and models. Really that's what science is all about. In my field, we all hope that the LHC finds the Higgs, that will solidify the Standard Model, but we also hope that it finds lots of things that don't fit the Standard Model, that would point the direction for future discovery. If we didn't find anything unusual at the LHC it might put a huge damper on particle physics, and I'd have to switch areas of research.
Sorry, have to refute this, as first explained by newton.
The Jupiter ball will indeed 'exert more gravity force', however, the extra masses involve require extra energy to accelerate. Drop a 1kg ball, 9.8m/s/s. drop a 2 kg ball, 9.8m/s/s. Twice the mass in the 2kg, but twice the force required to create the same acceleration.
You are wrong, have a nice day
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.
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)