Theory Challenging Einstein's View On Speed of Light Could Soon Be Tested (theguardian.com)

mspohr writes: The Guardian has a news article about a recently published journal entry proposing a way to test the theory that the speed of light was infinite at the birth of the universe: "The newborn universe may have glowed with light beams moving much faster than they do today, according to a theory that overturns Einstein's century-old claim that the speed of light is a constant. Joao Magueijo, of Imperial College London, and Niayesh Afshordi, of the University of Waterloo in Canada, propose that light tore along at infinite speed at the birth of the universe when the temperature of the cosmos was a staggering ten thousand trillion trillion celsius. Magueijo and Afshordi came up with their theory to explain why the cosmos looks much the same over vast distances. To be so uniform, light rays must have reached every corner of the cosmos, otherwise some regions would be cooler and more dense than others. But even moving at 1bn km/h, light was not traveling fast enough to spread so far and even out the universe's temperature differences." Cosmologists including Stephen Hawking have proposed a theory called inflation to overcome this conundrum. Inflation theorizes that the temperature of the cosmos evened out before it exploded to an enormous size. The report adds: "Magueijo and Afshordi's theory does away with inflation and replaces it with a variable speed of light. According to their calculations, the heat of universe in its first moments was so intense that light and other particles moved at infinite speed. Under these conditions, light reached the most distant pockets of the universe and made it look as uniform as we see it today. Scientists could soon find out whether light really did outpace gravity in the early universe. The theory predicts a clear pattern in the density variations of the early universe, a feature measured by what is called the 'spectral index.' Writing in the journal Physical Review, the scientists predict a very precise spectral index of 0.96478, which is close to the latest, though somewhat rough, measurement of 0.968."

Comments

If it works

[calexontheroad66]

Then build a beam that warms a local space line to a ridiculous big temperature and then... try to get stuff faster than light in a vacuum. Photons or vapors...

Re:If it works

[Anonymous Coward]

Why waste your time on that when you can simply map out the order of paralleled universes, and borrow some energy from the infinite energy?
You might create an uneven amount of matter-antimatter in that universe for the rest of time.. but we know it's not the worst thing that could happen...

Re:If it works

[saloomy]

This was my thought... a photon is a particle, that travels in a wave. It has some pressure when it shines on an object (see light sails, NASA). If light were to travel at an infinite speed, anything it encounters would be given an infinite amount of energy in the form of momentum. We can then deduce that this was not the case, since most of the sky is black and not full of stars (see Olbers' Paradox). An infinitely fast beam of light would have come into contact with "stuff", and given off an infinite amount of mass/energy (matter), and generated an infinitely dense universe with an infinite amount of energy.

E=MC^2 is dead. Long live E=MC^2!

Re:If it works

[silentcoder]

Temperature is a measure of the vibration rate of particles - it's not found in vacuums. I suspect the article/summary is oversimplifying or just using temperature as a convenient layman's analogue for heat (unless it refers to the vibration rates of particles in the early universe).

EIther way - do you have any idea how much energy it would take to build a beam that could heat anything up that much ? The amount of energy needed to heat something up depends on the specific heat of the substance, the amount you are heating up and the starting temperature. The last one doesn't much matter considering how huge the heat-up here is - it will be immeasurably small a factor. If we use water then 1g takes 1 calorie to heat up by 1 celcius. A calorie is 4.2 joules of energy.
So you would need 42 thousand trillion trillion joules of energy to raise just one gram of water that high. Just about any other substance - the number goes up.

As of 2012 Humanity produced 155105 TW/H of energy. That is just over 5 .5 trillion joules.

No problem, we just need to multiply the total energy production on earth by about ten thousand trillion times and we can do the experiment you're proposing.

But as the summary explains - we don't need to. The theory makes predictions about the universe which will be true if it holds, and false if inflation is correct - all we need to do is develop sufficiently good measurement technology to see if the prediction is true or not - which we should have fairly soon, and the fact that we are close to being able to do sufficiently accurate measurements to test it is literally the story you are commenting on.

Re:If it works

[Anonymous Coward]

2! = 2x1 = 2

Re:If it works

[110010001000]

I think you misunderstood him. This person is a "Space Nutter". He wasn't suggesting a rational experiment. What he is proposing it to use it to send a spacecraft to a distant star so he and his buddies won't have to live life here on Earth with the rest of the common folk.

Re:If it works

[calexontheroad66]

Yep, but you forgot about energy density, make the beam very compact.
How about pouring it into a plank length beam?
And that would be your carrier wave to pump other photons.

Re:If it works

[Anonymous Coward]

This was my thought... a photon is a particle, that travels in a wave. It has some pressure when it shines on an object (see light sails, NASA). If light were to travel at an infinite speed, anything it encounters would be given an infinite amount of energy in the form of momentum. We can then deduce that this was not the case, since most of the sky is black and not full of stars (see Olbers' Paradox). An infinitely fast beam of light would have come into contact with "stuff", and given off an infinite amount of mass/energy (matter), and generated an infinitely dense universe with an infinite amount of energy.

E=MC^2 is dead. Long live E=MC^2!

No. A photon is a quantized amount of energy which can exhibit particle like and wave like properties under different observations. It is not "a particle" that travels "in a wave"

Re:If it works

[Anonymous Coward]

Temperature is a measure of the vibration rate of particles - it's not found in vacuums. I suspect the article/summary is oversimplifying or just using temperature as a convenient layman's analogue for heat (unless it refers to the vibration rates of particles in the early universe).

MY approach is: Light has the speed of c because of its interaction with quantum foam along its path. Since the foamy nature of the universe is homogeneous for any given vacuum energy, the speed of life is homogeneous for any given time in the universe's life. That would lead to the speed of light being lesser in the dense early universe. According to my hypothesis, the speed of light would increase in a lower energy density [like in a decayed vacuum]. Greater speeds of light would be in the future, not in the beginning of the Universe.

Re:If it works

[PolygamousRanchKid]

So you would need 42 thousand trillion trillion joules of energy to raise just one gram of water that high.

I knew there was something special about that number being the answer . . .

Next you will tell me that the energy can be generated by a guitar amplifier that goes up to 11 . . .

Re:If it works

[silentcoder]

I just mulitplied the 4.2 joules by the 10 starting number in the target temperature - which was simpler than writing
4.2 * 10 thousand trillion trillion.

Re:If it works

[calexontheroad66]

Him?
What part of photons or vapors didn't you understand?
Glasses you need, hummm...
Or Troll you are...

Re:If it works

[Anonymous Coward]

The binary guy is a pretty old recognized troll, ignore.

Re:If it works

[PvtVoid]

Temperature is a measure of the vibration rate of particles - it's not found in vacuums.

The early universe was not a vacuum. It was an extremely dense, high-temperature plasma.

In any case, vacuum can in fact have a temperature, due to virtual particle production.

Re:If it works

[serviscope_minor]

Troll he most certainly is. Look at his posting history: it's filled with random nastiness.

Re: If it works

[Anonymous Coward]

A photon is consumed as quanta, when matter interacts with it.

But a "wave" with an infinite speed becomes just a potential of EM field of the same magnitude spread along the photon's path.

Either space was not space at all, or this new theory is a crackpot science.

Re: If it works

[Anonymous Coward]

I could do that, but right now my son is at home, crying all alone on the bedroom floor cause he's hungry. And the only way to feed him is to sleep with a man for a little bit of money. And his dad is gone, away smoking pot now, in and out of lockdown, I ain't got a job now!

So for you, building light tests is just a good time, but for me this is what I call life, mmm!

Re:If it works

[Anonymous Coward]

Funny thing about the Universe when you start to get near its limits. The more you know about the location of a photon, the less you know about its velocity. Also, the more you know about its timing, the less you know about its frequency.

This trade off means if you attempt to measure a photon over a very small distance, you will probably cause the photon to head off in a random direction at a random frequency.

Re:If it works

[silentcoder]

>The early universe was not a vacuum. It was an extremely dense, high-temperature plasma.
Agreed, but I was referring to the GP's suggestion to heat up a beam and send photons through a vaccuum.
I can see how my post could be ambiguous though.

>In any case, vacuum can in fact have a temperature, due to virtual particle production.
True again, but not really relevant to the point I was making. I am NOT going to try and calculate the energy required to heat up a vaccuum's virtual particles to the temperature of the big bang...

Re:If it works

[110010001000]

Oh come on, face it. A Space Nutter like you was all over this for the wrong reasons.

Re: If it works

[Anonymous Coward]

Nothing for the light to hit back tgen. No matter existed yet.

Re:If it works

[Anonymous Coward]

I think your calculations are off. 155105 Terawatt hours would produce 5.5e^20 which would be 550 Quintilian joules (or 550 trillion joules in eurospeak)

Re:If it works

[serviscope_minor]

It's interesting how you can invent complete lies about someone and they get modded up.

But go on, I'll bite. Provide a link to back up your accusation of space nuttery. 50 bucks says you can't.

Re:If it works

[Anonymous Coward]

Most space Nutters can be educated.
Then, there are those set in their ways.

Re:If it works

[Anonymous Coward]

1.55 GWH is 5.5 trillion joules

Re:If it works

[Maury Markowitz]

> a photon is a particle, that travels in a wave

No. This is just wrong. Completely. You need to make your brain unlearn this.

Here is a toy model you can use on your journey... Think of the photon as a cheshire cat. You cannot see the cat, if you try to perceive it completely, it will vanish. You can, however, ask it questions. If you ask it "what is your gizifa", it will say "10". Or in this case, you can ask "what is your momentum", and it might say "5".

Asking certain questions will upset the cat and cause it to change all the other values just to piss you off. So if you ask it what its momentum is, the answer you *might* have got for its gizifa will now change. These values also change on their own over time. So even if you know that its location is 2,7 now, when you ask it again later you will get a different answer. No, this is not *because you asked* (another common misconception), this is inherent to the way the cat works. Some of these values are conserved (like electric charge), others are not (like location) and others are linked together (like momentum and location).

Photons are not particles. There are no particles. "Particles" is the term we use when we refer to these things when you keep asking them what their location is. If you do that, they will give you nice answers like 2,7 and then 3,7 and then 4.7, and you'll go "oh, this thing is travelling along positive X, and it's a point, so it must be a particle!". But the problem is that if you ask it different questions, like its position and the location, then any semblance of particle-like behaviour will vanish. You were fooling yourself, ITS NOT A PARTICLE. Neither is an electron or a proton, or anything else. They're just quanta. It's all quanta.

> It has some pressure when it shines on an object

This is also incorrect.

Newton thought momentum had something to do with mass because he only had large objects to work with. Shotputs have a lot of momentum, and so do planets. But in the "real world" of quantum, momentum is just a number. It's a number like any other, like energy. It's not related to mass. You ask a quanta a question and it will give you an answer. If you ask a photon its mass it will say zero. And if you ask it its momentum it will say 5. These questions are orthogonal, they don't have anything to do with each other.

So why does it LOOK like momentum has something to do with mass? Because the momentum of any one quanta is tiny, so in order to be measurable at macro scales, you need a WHOLE LOT OF QUANTA. It's very easy to make a ball of protons and electrons, because they attract each other. So you put a bunch together and call it a shotput and notice that it has a lot of momentum. But the fact that it has a lot of momentum isn't because it has a lot of mass - it has a lot of mass AND momentum because it *has a lot of quanta*.

It is much harder to make a big ball of photons, they don't attract each other. If you did such a thing, you'd find it had just as much momentum as a ball of matter, but still has no mass.

> and given off an infinite amount of mass/energy

No. Energy is also a measurement of the same sort, it's just a number you can ask for. It has nothing to do with "speed". Some of these values you ask for are more interesting than others because they are concerned, but that's not due to quanta, that's due to the shape of the universe.

Re:If it works

[Anonymous Coward]

I think this is a philosophical question...

If the universe is only 4x4 sub-atomic particles wide and a light beam travels across the universe instantly, due to the small size, is the speed not infinite? If all existence is compacted back into a singularity, and I can travel across all of existence instantly, am I not travelling at infinite speeds?

We also know things don't work the same at the quantum layer. time does not seem to exist there, indicating it is all one particle (as we think of things).

There you go, solved.

Re: If it works

[Anonymous Coward]

I see the flaw with The Secret... Only asking THIS universe for things

Re:If it works

[Gr8Apes]

Besides the fact that your understanding of currently stated physics is sadly off the mark, as others noted before me with more than adequate detail. The other aspect you completely miss is that the physics of the early universe as described in TFS followed different laws than the current laws we have, which means all assumptions you make using currently understood physics based relationships are most likely invalid.

Re:If it works

[Anonymous Coward]

Looked for the "Insightformative" mod for you. Well put sir.

Re:If it works

[Anonymous Coward]

DFTT

Re:If it works

[suutar]

totally wishing I had a mod point now. Thanks!

Re: If it works

[MightyMartian]

Absolutely correct. At its core, this crackpot theory doesn't even seem to understand what the Big Bang was. The whole point of Big Bang cosmology is that everything was, at the initial moment of the Big Bang at the same point. As to differences in CMBR temperature, those, along with the large scale structure of the observable universe are explained by quantum fluctuations in the early universe.

What this "theory" purports to explain has in fact been explained for decades. There are lots of mysteries in cosmology, but the general homogeneity with some temperature structural variation isn't among those mysteries.

Re:If it works

[amicusNYCL]

I totally agree. Modern physics luminaries like yourself and I understand that nothing that we know ever changes, that chemical propellant is the pinnacle of universal space flight technology, that Newton had everything correct, and since Newton had everything correct then Einstein was wrong in the first place and therefore this story about his so-called "theory" being challenged is fundamentally flawed. Einstein was a space nutter and should have stuck to the stupid patent office. I don't know who this Stephen Hawkins fellow is but he sounds like a real idiot.

Re:If it works

[ShanghaiBill]

What he is proposing it to use it to send a spacecraft to a distant star so he and his buddies won't have to live life here on Earth with the rest of the common folk.

Also, we want to have sex with green Orion slave girls. We aren't having much luck with Earth girls.

Re:If it works

[Anonymous Coward]

The thing your post misses is, why is a quanta not a particle? You say that repeatedly and effectively, but you don't say why.

This is a profound question. The concept of Planck quanta is common. Yet it's perfectly valid to conceptualize quanta as fundamental particles. Simply calling these objects "quanta" does not resolve the issue of what it is that they are.

The standard answer is "they are waves". Yet this too is a limited answer. Multiple lines of evidence suggest that fundamental entities are both particles and waves. They switch identities based upon what you measure (unless they simply have both identities simultaneously, and by asking the question, i.e. measuring with a biased outcome preference, you self-select). This is how we arrive at the particle/wave duality.

Re:If it works

[Fragnet]

I just want to confuse the issue. The photon travels at the speed of light. From the photon's point of view it "arrives" as soon as it departed due to time dilation. In order to travel an infinite distance in zero time, the distance travelled must be zero too (Lorentz Contraction). So from our point of view the photon has taken 14.7 billion ly to travel from the edge of the observable universe to our telescope. From its point of view it's travelled nowhere in zero time.

Please correct me if I'm wrong. I'm not a physicist. I read about this and thought it completely ridiculous...

Re:If it works

[jeff4747]

The thing your post misses is, why is a quanta not a particle? You say that repeatedly and effectively, but you don't say why.

Because it doesn't behave like a particle.

Using the previous poster's question analogy, you ask a quanta particle-based questions, and you get answers that look like a particle. And those answers make it impossible for that quanta to be a wave.

But if you ask that same quanta wave-based questions, you get answers that look like a wave. And those answers make it impossible for that quanta to be a particle. (For example, the classic double-slit experiment.)

Re: If it works

[Anonymous Coward]

It's a dessert topping AND a floor wax!

Re:If it works

[silentcoder]

>Next you will tell me that the energy can be generated by a guitar amplifier that goes up to 11 . . .
Just don't play it at 85 miles an hour or you will create a paradox by travelling back in time.

Re:If it works

[silentcoder]

I actually used Google to that calculation - even if you're right and Google was wrong (or I made a typo) - that's only two orders of magnitude, we need a whole lot more... more orders of magnitude.

Re:If it works

[silentcoder]

Not quite. But not for the reason you think. At that early point in the universe - time did not exist. Since speed is a factor of time. Speed therefore did not exist. Saying infinite speed is no different from saying velocity of zero - because neither concept actually existed yet. The universe had to reach at least the point where time existed (which happened as it begun to expand - so is not true at the 'singularity' level) before velocity could exist.

Re: If it works

[Anonymous Coward]

Pretty sure that we don't need more than 1.21 jigawatts

Re: If it works

[Anonymous Coward]

If only there was a way to mod this 'right but still a dick'. F=ma is wrong but it's right enough for a lot of applications here on earth. Putting on your pointy shoes and spouting doesn't help anyone. Photons sometimes loom like waves and sometimes look like particles just like a lot of things bully (appropriate word there) for you for knowing that everything is just quanta

Re: If it works

[Anonymous Coward]

Because it doesn't behave like a particle.

Well, you are right that it does not behave like *a* particle in a *linear* time model, but it does behave like *a* particle in a *branching* time model with interference of the branches.

Re:If it works

[Anonymous Coward]

Dunno 'bout Stevo, but his sister Jennifer Hawkins is real purdy-like.

Re: If it works

[Anonymous Coward]

However, this requires the existence of "meta-time" to explain how "expansion" could occur in the absence of time. It is quite a bit simpler to say that the fundamental constants c and h changed with time, and thereby avoid the need to introduce a notion of meta-time.

Re: If it works

[kyjellyfish]

Maury, I want to thank you for making quantum theory more accessible and a bit more palatable. Well done!!ðYOEYðYOEYðYOEYðYOEYðYOEY

Re:If it works

[RockDoctor]

The paper is at http://journals.aps.org.secure...

I suspect the article/summary is oversimplifying

You're probably right - it's a safe bet.

Temperature is a measure of the vibration rate of particles - it's not found in vacuums.

I'm not sure that works, r is relevant. There is no such thing as a vacuum - you can remove every particle and all photons from a volume of space ... and as you're doing it the space will remain populated with virtual particles springing out from the void in accord with Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle. Those particles will have a spectrum of velocities and therefore a temperature in the sense you're denying the existence of.

So you would need 42 thousand trillion trillion joules of energy to raise just one gram of water that high. Just about any other substance - the number goes up.

Water has an unusually high specific heat capacity. In the units you use, yes, it's 4.2 ; for most materials it's 1.0 or lower. Not that that changes your point by much.

Re:If it works

[lucien86]

The whole problem with the theory is that E = mc^2 doesn't fail. If C is infinite then a single photon has infinite energy. I have worked on FTL theories for years and one old idea is that the universe began as a single photon with an enormous energy, this decayed to produce the big bang and also created the absolute frame that forms the FTL universe. The phase space of the absolute frame is completely empty because its infinity becomes impossible to reach for anything with less energy than that initial photon. The photons described could still exist but by the definition of the absolute frame their energy and speed would be finite.

Infinity is one of the hardest parts of the FTL region of physics because its maths is alien to the maths used in theories like general relativity. The basic solution is to give all infinites an arbitrary finite value. The special case of n/0 is treated as an imaginary infinite, and it has the base of net 0. Photons have a net zero mass made of positive and negative fractions - ie have imaginary mass. The definition also means that from the context of the STL space photons have an infinite energy and speed, which appears as the familiar 'finite' speed of light 2.99E8 m/s. By all this logic even that first photon ultimately has a finite mass - at least to whatever is outside the universe.

Most of this FTL physics stuff is always ultimately unprovable anyway. That's a big part of why most physicists hate it so much.. :)

Re:If it works

[Anonymous Coward]

steve-o is kinda purdy but i always preferred johnny knoxville

Re:If it works

[Anonymous Coward]

85?? methinks you need to watch that movie again

Rupert Sheldrake proposed that years ago

[Anonymous Coward]

Rupert Sheldrake is an incredibly insightful and intelligent man who figured this out by comparing historical measurements of the speed of light and noticed very small variation. Of course, as he was not part of the scientific "elite", such groundbreaking, status-quo-destroying discoveries were not allowed for him, so he was quickly and effectively humiliated and declared persona non grata, basically ruining his further career. Now some bottom feeder dug up Sheldrake's research and is trying to steal his achievements for himself. He will probably succeed, just like Einstein did with De Pretto's research.

Nature varies

[MrKaos]

Why would anything in the universe be constant? Maybe the variability is beyond our ability to observe.

Re:Nature varies

[Anonymous Coward]

Damn it... don't make Cosmologists cry at night... Without the speed of light being constant.... they basically have no thing 'constant' lol

Re:Nature varies

[Anonymous Coward]

Why? Thermodynamics.

Everything in the Universe tends towards a state of equilibrium and change is expensive.

Though I don't believe you have constants in the absolute sense (as in, a value that cannot be changed no matter what), I believe that if you do manage to change some "constant" (which would undoubtedly require a massive amount of energy), it would eventually "reset" to some minimum energy state once you stopped doing whatever it is you did to change it.

Re:Nature varies

[abies]

Anti-arbitrage rule. E = mc^2. If c varies, then you could find a moment where converting energy to matter and later matter to energy would produce surplus energy, allowing you to perform arbitrage against laws of thermodynamic, producing perpetual motion/free energy.

Re:Nature varies

[fph il quozientatore]

This is a circular argument. To quote GP, why would energy be constant? Maybe the variability is beyond our ability to observe. Maybe thermodynamics is wrong, and free energy can be produced but only in very small quantities.

Re:Nature varies

[geekmux]

...Maybe the variability is beyond our ability to observe.

Uh yeah. This.

Even with all of our technological advances we can observe what, a sliver of a fraction of our galaxy? That's like predicting the temperature across the entire history of Jupiter's existence based off a single weather report from central Kansas last Tuesday.

Oh, and one more thing. Since we has defined the 'spectral index' down to the numerical gnats ass here presumably for accuracy, exactly how fast is "infinite" again?

Re:Nature varies

[Anonymous Coward]

Isn't gravitational potential energy effectively infinite? I mean how else does energy "magically" appear in the vacuum with continuous inflation models?

Re:Nature varies

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually the correct equation to consider would be m=E/c. The fact that energy is conserved is an absolute fact, so that an increase of c would imply a decrease of masses for a system at rest (constant energy). At the limit of infinite c, all masses are zero. There would be no such a thing that can be called "mass" with limitless speed.

Re:Nature varies

[locofungus]

If there's no mass then E=cp (from E^2 = c^2 p^2 + m_0^2 c^4)

So you've still got a problem with infinities

You've asserted that Energy is still conserved so E=hf should still hold (for a photon). Assuming Planck's constant doesn't change then \lambda must become infinite if c becomes infinite which, in turn implies that the universe must be infinitely large.

The problem with all these hairbrained schemes is that people throw them around without working through all the consequences and explaining exactly how they are all dealt with.

When that is done it's almost always the case that there's something apparent that we already know to be false.

(I'll leave it as an exercise to see what happens if Planck's constant also changes :-) I don't recall if it was Fantastic Voyage or Asimov's sequel but I vaguely remember that the basic theory was that they wanted to reduce h but it turned out that this actually increased c at the same time - so the idea isn't new, it's already been played with by SF authors. What would turn this from SF to science is working through all the implications instead of just handwaving them away)

Re:Nature varies

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually the correct equation to consider would be m=E/c. The fact that energy is conserved is an absolute fact, so that an increase of c would imply a decrease of masses for a system at rest (constant energy). At the limit of infinite c, all masses are zero. There would be no such a thing that can be called "mass" with limitless speed.

That's a problem, because the relativistic mass tends to infinity as you approach c.

Re: Nature varies

[Anonymous Coward]

Nope. The only way to do anything useful with gravitational potential energy is to turn it into kinetic energy, and to do that you have to... (wait for it) give up the gravitational potential energy.

You can't have your gravity and eat it, too.

Re: Nature varies

[Anonymous Coward]

So where does the vacuum energy of inflation come from? If we're going to assume the universe was born with energy E and absolutely none of that is ever created or destroyed.

Re:Nature varies

[ledow]

Pi is constant.

Zero is constant.

Both appear in the natural world an awful lot.

Re:Nature varies

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, but the discussion here is that c is also infinity, which means you can't approach c. If c is infinity, then m must be zero, and zero amount of energy is required to accelerate a zero mass object to the speed of light, which is infinity, meaning you'll never reach it even if going infinitely fast. infinity != infinity.

Re:Nature varies

[limaxray]

You miss understand what E=mc^2 means - it has nothing to do with converting mass to energy or energy to mass. It is stating the fact that energy has mass, and that the majority of the mass of an atom comes from incredible amounts of potential energy in the nucleus (and thus nuclear energy). If c varies it would just mean the mass of a given amount of energy would vary with it, assuming E=mc^2 holds true.

Re:Nature varies

[Scarred Intellect]

... E = mc^2. If c varies...

Slashdot's quote on the bottom of the page: "In any formula, constants (especially those obtained from handbooks) are to be treated as variables."

Re:Nature varies

[Anonymous Coward]

To the extent that they relate to the physical world, they are not constant. The ratio of the circumference of a rotating disk to it diameter is less pi, and it is also altered by gravitational fields. Zero is not necessarily zero as far as many quantities are concerned (zero-point fluctuations).

Re:Nature varies

[Buchenskjoll]

exactly how fast is "infinite" again?

It's considerably faster than half infinite.

Re:Nature varies

[Rockoon]

Perhaps the exponent of 2.0 is just an approximation .. an average

And it seems to me that if space isnt perfectly flat (and we know it isnt) then assuming "2" could be wrong.

Re:Nature varies

[JoeMerchant]

The varying of c could change the energy content of matter in the affected space, preventing the creation of "Free Energy" - or, there may be layers of the Universe of which we are not fully aware, and when the first successful perpetual motion machine is demonstrated, its "apparent free energy" may be being drawn from there.

Without Einstein's theories, a nuclear explosion certainly would look like the magical creation of large quantities of free energy.

Re:Nature varies

[PvtVoid]

The problem with all these hairbrained schemes is that people throw them around without working through all the consequences and explaining exactly how they are all dealt with.

When that is done it's almost always the case that there's something apparent that we already know to be false.

I'm sure this never occurred to the authors of the work, given that they are actual theoretical physicists and all. (Theories with varying speeds of light, which are entirely consistent with relativity, have been around for many decades. )

Re:Nature varies

[DerekLyons]

Even with all of our technological advances we can observe what, a sliver of a fraction of our galaxy?

Um, no. Much larger than that - more like a considerable way back to the Big Bang.

Re:Nature varies

[shess]

Anti-arbitrage rule. E = mc^2. If c varies, then you could find a moment where converting energy to matter and later matter to energy would produce surplus energy, allowing you to perform arbitrage against laws of thermodynamic, producing perpetual motion/free energy.

Doesn't sound like the Big Bang at all!

Re:Nature varies

[Anonymous Coward]

You _almost_ have it right; thanks.
I'm sure that you have some concept of the value of "c", in Meters per second. But "E" and "M" have values as well, I'll leave a few spaces for you to figure them out or look them up before cheating:

"E" was specifically chosen, and only through convention is it associated with Energy. "E" stands for an old non-SI unit of measurement for Energy called an "Erg", and "M" stands for a unit of Mass called a "Gram". Einstein wasn't just playing with abstract Algebra on a chalkboard; it's actually pretty basic Arithmetic. Oh, Algebra does make it easier to derive a whole lot of Relativity out it, based on only one Constant: The Speed Of Light, which was already well known before Einstein got to it. I'll paste the Arithmetic below:
Energy in Ergs = 1 Gram x ( 30,000,000,000.0 cM/sec) x (30,000,000,000.0 cM/sec).

That is in essence the Mass Energy Equivalence in Units that we can play with. "Ergs" are uncomfortable to use these days; some of us prefer "Watts". Well, one Watt per second is equal to 10 Million Ergs. As an exercise for Students; derive the Equation above in Watts per second instead of Ergs, or Horsepower or BTU, and for Mass, use the Roman "Libra".
The formula "E=M(C^2)" does get a bit messy then, so if asked to calculate how fast a Proton needs to be accelerated to, to double its Relative Mass, a very practical and routine derivation, start with the basic equation, and for Mass, convert Grams into Electron Volts, which by the way, due to Mass Energy Equivalence, is a perfectly cromulent unit of Mass. Start with One Proton equals 938.28MeV or 1.6726(10^(-24)) Grams.
https://einstein.stanford.edu/content/relativity/q388.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erg

captcha: relegate

Re:Nature varies

[Anonymous Coward]

Sorry about this...
"Pi" in Nature occurs very rarely, so rarely that I'm having difficulty thinking of just one instance. Galaxies, Stars, and Planets, Puffballs, Raindrops and Protons... none of them are Spherical or even Circular. Planets can't even follow circular orbits, unless they are utterly without Mass.
Oh, there are instances where we like to think of them in terms of "Pi", and our invention of "Pi" makes models of them easier to comprehend, but that doesn't mean that those models have any real physical existence.

Even "Zero" is a convention, invented to make Decimal Algebra work by some clever Arabs. (Some clever Indians may chooses to dispute this.) "Zero" in the Natural World may best be thought of as "Absence", but even that is difficult to find. Empty "Space" is full of "Stuff", some of it winking in and out of existence in Time that makes a Femtosecond seem like an Eternity; the Mass of a Proton on a World ten Billion Light Years away still has a (However minuscule... but not Zero) Gravitational effect on how quickly a Cat here falls to the floor, butter side down.

I have an old copy of the Oak Ridge Table Of Nuclei, the one Edited, (And Autographed...), by Darlene Hoffman. On the back page is a list of Constants of convenient use for Physicists, and easy for Little Leonardos. Darlene once mentioned that the List was the most controversial part of the Project. Even Planck's Constant had some Detractors, in that they believed that it could _never_ be precisely defined in SI Units. That sort of Math evades us, and the kind of Math in which Planck's Constant can be precisely defined is just too damn difficult for most. Still, Planck's Constant, recently measured accurately to a few parts per Billion, (Thanks LHC!), is proposed to be a fixed basic Constant in a new SI Units scheme by 2018:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proposed_redefinition_of_SI_base_units
Why? It makes a _lot_ of Math easier, even if it is still illusionary.

Re:Nature varies

[Anonymous Coward]

Zero is not necessarily zero as far as many quantities are concerned (zero-point fluctuations).

Zero is the size of the empty set. It does not change. Zero-point fluctuations just have zero in their name, but are not a quantity at all. Ground state is a better term, because it is less confusing.

Re:Nature varies

[geekmux]

Even with all of our technological advances we can observe what, a sliver of a fraction of our galaxy?

Um, no. Much larger than that - more like a considerable way back to the Big Bang.

Mapping our historical universe is a bit different than defining our observable universe.

We're still doing a lot of this work in the dark, both figuratively and literally.

Re:Nature varies

[geekmux]

exactly how fast is "infinite" again?

It's considerably faster than half infinite.

So, I would assume somewhere between Ludicrous and Plaid, then?

Sorry to be such a bother, just trying to figure out if I need to change the combination on my luggage.

Re:Nature varies

[pD-brane]

I can recommend the amusing and educational SF book Mr. Tompkins in Paperback by George Gamow, where the main character experiences the effects of a reduced speed of light and an increased Planck's constant.

Re:Nature varies

[lgw]

Not, that's just unit conversion stuff. Anyhow, real physics is done in units where c=1, so the exponent doesn't matter (as you'd expect, if it's just about the unit of measure).

Re:Nature varies

[lgw]

Much of the observable universe is the historical universe. "Long ago" and "far away" are two ways of saying the same thing. We can directly observe the universe at different stages of history back to about 300k years old (everything before that, including everything inflation-related, is indirect guesswork).

Re:Nature varies

[geekmux]

Much of the observable universe is the historical universe. "Long ago" and "far away" are two ways of saying the same thing. We can directly observe the universe at different stages of history back to about 300k years old (everything before that, including everything inflation-related, is indirect guesswork).

This is true, but since 300K years is essentially a sliver of a fraction of the age of the universe, I think we've both observed how much of this is in fact guesswork.

Re:Nature varies

[lgw]

"Pi" in Nature occurs very rarely, so rarely that I'm having difficulty thinking of just one instance.

Pi is everywhere. Circles are how pi is introduced to children. Pi is everywhere waves are, and since everything is a wave, well, it comes up a lot. Of course, the pi is often hidden in the definition of units, since it gets old writing 2pi all over the place (h-bar, the Coulomb constant, etc).

Even "Zero" is a convention,

No, not really. Math isn't about counting or computation, you know. And any sort of abstract algebra needs its 0 (and its 1, if you want a field).

Re:Nature varies

[buchner.johannes]

We have some observational constraints on the speed of light.
11 billion years ago (when the universe was 2 billion years old), the speed of light was about the same as it is now. https://arxiv.org/abs/1609.087...
Otherwise, the light crossing certain objects would be different. This result is essentially independent of cosmology.

I guess that the cosmic microwave background also places limits. If the speed of light had been infinite at that time, I suspect the last scattering would be affected. This is ~300.000 years after the big bang.

But at the time of inflation ... sure, could be infinite, I guess.

Re:Nature varies

[lgw]

You possibly misunderstand (or I misunderstand your post). We can directly observe the universe at times between now (universe 13.8 billion years old) and when the CMBR was emitted (universe 300k years old).

It's only the very early stuff that's indirect, and even then the properties of the universe at 300k years old tell us some very interesting things about earlier times - thus all the inflation theories.

Re:Nature varies

[DerekLyons]

Mapping our historical universe is a bit different than defining our observable universe.

Not at all - because they are one and the same. Even looking as close as the Moon, the finite speed of light means we're seeing the past. Looking out to (say) the Andromeda galaxy, it's both observable and millennia in the past. (And M31 is far from the furthest object we can see in distance or in time. We can see much more than "a tiny sliver of our own galaxy".)
 

We're still doing a lot of this work in the dark, both figuratively and literally.

No, not at all. "This work" is either being done by direct observation, or extrapolated from direct observation. (Which extrapolation is then proved or disproved by further comparison to direct observation.) It's not guesswork.

Re:Nature varies

[Anonymous Coward]

If the universe is quantized, then pi is just an idealized abstraction that does not actually exist.

Re:Nature varies

[geekmux]

You possibly misunderstand (or I misunderstand your post). We can directly observe the universe at times between now (universe 13.8 billion years old) and when the CMBR was emitted (universe 300k years old).

It's only the very early stuff that's indirect, and even then the properties of the universe at 300k years old tell us some very interesting things about earlier times - thus all the inflation theories.

Fair points, and very true. Thanks for the clarity.

Re:Nature varies

[painandgreed]

This is a circular argument. To quote GP, why would energy be constant? Maybe the variability is beyond our ability to observe. Maybe thermodynamics is wrong, and free energy can be produced but only in very small quantities.

To an extent, it is circular argument as science does have some basic assumptions. One being that the laws of physics work everywhere and another being that they do not change, thus experiments are repeatable in any location. These are like the axioms of mathematics. They have served us well and have held up when we make predictions using them. It could be that they might not be quite true. In that case, it's not like everything we've known will cease to work, we'll just have to redefine some things. An example of this would be the theory of relativity and its effects on our knowledge of Newtonian physics. Why should some things be constant throughout the universe, because we have defined them a such. One example being the speed of light in a vacuum. If we do find that the speed of light is conditional, then that will require a reworking of physics to some extent. Still, when dealing with the big bang and the time we are speaking about, such bizarreness might not be all that foundation shattering as the expansion of space is a pretty weird phenomenon itself driven means we probably aren't sure about. Add in suspicion that the universe could have been at a false vacuum at some point, and if it was, the universal constants would have been different as would have been the laws of physics.

Re:Nature varies

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't think you've comprehended what gp is saying.

we can observe the last 13 or so billion years, minus the first 300k years after the big bang.

Re:Nature varies

[clovis]

Why would anything in the universe be constant? Maybe the variability is beyond our ability to observe.

Anyone who has studied the time cube already knows this.

Re:Nature varies

[TechnoJoe]

Not if c only varies by time. If c is constant throughout all points in space and varies only by time, then you wouldn't have any of those problems.

Re:Nature varies

[TechnoJoe]

I'll leave it as an exercise to see what happens if Planck's constant also changes

Mod parent up. And I mean to Stephen Hawking levels. He seems to be the only person (at least on slashdot) who picked up the implications for Planck's constant. Planck's constant has to change inversely proportional to the speed of light.

Hear are some things going on that scientists don't like to talk about.

The speed of light is decreasing over time. Over the past 400 years, there have been about 30 different methods for measuring the speed of light, and all of them produce lower results than historical results, even when performed by the same people using the same equipment.

Planck's constant is increasing, proportional to changes in the speed of light. Probably related.

The red shift is quantized. If red shift were really due to velocity, it would be smooth and continuous, like notes from a trombone. It's not. It's quantized, like keys on a piano. If you believe that's due to velocity, then you have to believe that the universe expands, suddenly stops, and then expands some more.

Atomic time is slowing. At least compared to mechanical clocks. But it's not just that the clocks are off. They are consistently off by larger and larger amounts, which indicates a drift.

I believe all of these can be explained by changes to the Zero-point energy. Before you label me as nutty, please research these things for yourself. If I'm really wrong, it should be easy enough to prove.

Kudos to locofungus for being on the ball!

Re: Nature varies

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, if we are to believe physicists, then it supposedly comes from a asymmetry in the gauge field. Sorry, that is where my knowledge stops currently on Quantum Field Theory. That said, I think it is wrong. I do not think inflation was due to gauge field asymmetry, and I do not think the Big Bang was a expansion, rather, I think it was a collapse. I have a theory that almost explains everything, however, I am missing one conservation law, and it only applies to Quantum Electrodynamics, so I have to figure out how to extend it to QFT. Once I have that, I think we will have the complete set of laws of physics. And when I say "complete" I mean totally complete, down to bit-level correctness.

Re:Nature varies

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd love to see some links to back up these assertions

Re:Nature varies

[Anonymous Coward]

time isn't constant and absolute either. if your proposal was true you'd have a different speed of light in gravity wells, where less time has elapsed

He's been banging this drum a long time

[Maritz]

I read his book back in the 90s when I was in school. Was an interesting enough idea, but going up against Einstein and Inflation at the same time - it's a looooong shot.

The summary crediting Hawking for inflation is a complete joke. Goes to show if you get a bit of fame in a field you get credited with everything.

Re:He's been banging this drum a long time

[ilguido]

Well, it says "cosmologists including Stephen Hawking", so this time the summary is not that wrong.

Re:He's been banging this drum a long time

[Anonymous Coward]

It's 2016, not reading the summary is the new 'not reading the article'.

English paper has to cite Stephen Hawking

[Anonymous Coward]

But he is not the father of the inflation. They are not saying he is but as they wrote it it is like it. It was so difficult for the journalist to do a small search to cite the real fathers of the inflation idea?

Come on!

Don't forget all the options

[TheDarkMaster]

Is interesting to remember that may be possible that there has not even been a big bang to start (and therefore the answer may be that the universe has always been more or less uniform).

Re:Don't forget all the options

[BlueStrat]

Is interesting to remember that may be possible that there has not even been a big bang to start (and therefore the answer may be that the universe has always been more or less uniform).

To quote 'Forrest Gump'; "Maybe...maybe it's a little bit of both?...both happening at the same time?"

Maybe there was a 'Big Bang' but what actually happened was that it exploded into tiny bits of space-time+matter+energy which, being essentially pieces of space-time, had no limits regarding 'velocity', and then some time later coalesced into a single fabric forming our universe. In fact, it may still be coalescing and is responsible for what we interpret as 'expansion'.

Strat

Re:Don't forget all the options

[wonkey_monkey]

Is interesting to remember that may be possible that there has not even been a big bang to start

Only in the same sense that it's possible dinosaurs never really existed and all the bones were put there by God.

Re:Don't forget all the options

[TheDarkMaster]

It's also possible, true

Re:Don't forget all the options

[BlueStrat]

Maybe there was a 'Big Bang' but what actually happened was that it exploded into tiny bits of space-time+matter+energy which, being essentially pieces of space-time, had no limits regarding 'velocity', and then some time later coalesced into a single fabric forming our universe. In fact, it may still be coalescing and is responsible for what we interpret as 'expansion'.

Apologies, don't normally respond to my own posts, but it also occurred to me that these pieces of space-time that have not yet joined may be where scientists find that 'missing mass'/'dark matter'. It's out there, it just hasn't joined the rest of us yet in this meta-bubble of space-time. There are likely other cosmological/astrophysical/physics phenomena, observations, and properties of the universe this might explain as well.

Strat

Re:Don't forget all the options

[TheDarkMaster]

Do not ever understand what I wrote as an assertion of religious mumbo-jumbo, I am one of those who views religion as a cancer (pay attention to my signature). What I am saying is that we should not disregard other possibilities such as the universe simply be far, far, far bigger than we can see.

Re:Don't forget all the options

[Anonymous Coward]

Good luck with this line of argument on Slashdot. Disregarding other possibilities is a way of life.

Re:Don't forget all the options

[Anonymous Coward]

> Do not ever understand what I wrote as an assertion of religious mumbo-jumbo

Your hands, and even your hips and feet, were waving in worhip of the dread "SmarterThanPhysics" god. It was entertaining to watch for anyone who's never been a sophomore and seen entire classes of people who've never actually done a physical experiment trying to pretend they understood any math whatsoever.

Re:Don't forget all the options

[Anonymous Coward]

(pay attention to my signature).

I read Brazilian Basher/Traitor of the land that feeds him.

Re:Don't forget all the options

[TheDarkMaster]

(pay attention to my signature).

I read Brazilian Basher/Traitor of the land that feeds him.

Then I see that you are unable to understand even the most basic and direct text. By chance you would be a monkey?

Re:Don't forget all the options

[TheDarkMaster]

Go bother someone else, serviscope_minor...

Re:Don't forget all the options

[serviscope_minor]

Go bother someone else, serviscope_minor...

I love the smell of paranoia in the morning.

It's cute that you think so, but trust me, I don't need to hide behind AC to insult you. You fight like a dairy farmer.

Re:Don't forget all the options

[TheDarkMaster]

Am I "fighting" you? Curious how did you respond in minutes to a comment that was not addressed to you and therefore you would not know unless you are the AC... You're just a random retard dude, like I said before go bother someone else.

Re:Don't forget all the options

[Anonymous Coward]

By chance you would be a monkey?

ah, the /. friendly discussions! * I'm a different AC, not the GP

Re:Don't forget all the options

[Anonymous Coward]

Speed of light is really just the speed of causality. The faster this speed is the faster the Universe evolves, time goes faster. I have no fundamental issues with the speed of light being faster in lieu of inflation, because it could mean the same end result. I would say that it is a quite exotic concept to mess with the laws of the Universe rather than just manipulating space-time because that is already happening.

Re:Don't forget all the options

[Anonymous Coward]

"Religion: The greatest weapon of mass destruction of all time"...created by assholes like me.

Re:Don't forget all the options

[serviscope_minor]

Am I "fighting" you?

Very well, I shall insult you again. Your mother was a hamster and your father smelled of elderberries.

Curious how did you respond in minutes to a comment that was not addressed to you :shrug:

Or, you know, I happened to be reading the thread at that time, as you can tell by my other comment with an earlier timestamp. Though honestly given your delusions about physics, I am not surprised you have paranoid delusions about me too.

I said before go bother someone else.

Why should I? It turns out that my mere existence is enough to bother you into replying to random ACs. To be honest I find that pretty funny, so I don't really see why I should stop :)

Re: Don't forget all the options

[TheDarkMaster]

All this time to be able to think a excuse? As i said before kiddo, go bother someone else.

Re: Don't forget all the options

[serviscope_minor]

All this time to be able to think a excuse?

oookaaay. You're as delusional about me as you are about physics. Tell you what when the EM drive works and we have free energy forever, I'll start stalking you as an AC. Deal?

go bother someone else.

Nope!

Re:Don't forget all the options

[wonkey_monkey]

Yikes, settle down. Just trying to give a simple analogy for how strong the evidence is for the Big Bang.

What I am saying is that we should not disregard other possibilities such as the universe simply be far, far, far bigger than we can see.

We already know it is. But we're also pretty damn sure it puffed itself up about 13.8 billion years ago.

Re:Don't forget all the options

[wonkey_monkey]

ah, the /. friendly discussions! * I'm a different AC, not the GP

Too right. As if I'd be caught dead starting a sentence with a lower-case letter or forgetting a closing full stop, the very idea...

Re:Don't forget all the options

[TheDarkMaster]

Something I do not like in purely written communication, the other side have no way of knowing if you are offended or if you are just wanting to make your point very clear. It is necessary because my experience shows that most people are unable to interpret the most basic texts and they then resort to forcing what they read in some version that fits into their simple-minded way of seeing the world (black/white, yes/no, friend/foe).

This said, I assure you that I know perfectly well the big bang theory and I agree that it makes sense... I just think it important to always remember that theories are not Laws and that we may be wrong about everything we know so far (scary, but not impossible), so therefore is healthy to always think about we might be missing out something important. Otherwise we'll end up looking religious fanatics with inverted polarity like this kiddo who's been bothering me.

Re:Don't forget all the options

[Anonymous Coward]

@The Dark Master [oooh, I'm so affraid...]

Go suck the big Dilma's clit, communist asshole.

Re:Don't forget all the options

[TheDarkMaster]

The AC you mentioned does not seems able to understand the simplest idea expressed in a sentence (in this case my signature) and relate it correctly to what was said in the comment. What else I could think of him?

Re:Don't forget all the options

[lgw]

Ah, found the on-topic thread.

Look, we know from direct observation that the universe was much smaller and hotter when it was 300K years old. You might argue "we don't know that there was a singularity", and that's a strong argument. You might argue "we don't know the universe keeps getting smaller or hotter the farther back you go", but that's not a scientific argument unless you have an alternative that explains all the same stuff (as Penrose has with his cyclic cosmology). But to claim everything might be steady state is just nonsense.

theories are not Laws

A law is just a terse theory. It's not a better kind of theory or anything.

healthy to always think about we might be missing out something important

Sure, but "missing something important" is very different from "all our observations might be wrong". The latter is shunned even by philosophers as pointless to consider, as it leads nowhere.

Re: Don't forget all the options

[Anonymous Coward]

D'awww..... isn't young love cute?

old news

[Anonymous Coward]

Mainstream media reported this a week ago. I wondered back then why Slashdot was reporting Trump related articles instead of this.

Re:old news

[PPH]

Information (light) travels more slowly around dense objects.

Infinite speed?

[TanjaTheMoogle]

I'm no physics professional, but I read up on it here and there. I could be wrong, but I seem to recall that arriving at infinities in physics meant that something was wrong. I definitely recall that being said in my college-level physics courses. There's also the Ultraviolet Catastrophe that immediately comes to mind. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Re:Infinite speed?

[ledow]

This kind of physics is not physics, It's maths.

Maths has no problem with infinities. Hell, we classify different types of infinities and apple actions to them in different ways. An infinity doesn't scare a mathematician.

The problem is then applying that to a real-world interpretation as "infinite" anything - space, time, energy, matter - is hard to conceive and generally impossible. However, infinities themselves can cancel out, present only in impossible situations anyway, and so on. Same with quantum physics - the maths tells you WHAT happens, and we've confirmed the maths by multiple observations of exactly all the weird things the maths predicts, but we're still not entirely sure we're describing EVERYTHING as there are a few oddballs.

Infinities don't mean something's inherently wrong. And infinities come up in Maths all the time, from basic arithmetic onwards.

The problem is not that there's an infinity. It's having an infinity as the answer without a real-world analogue to that mathematical answer.

Re:Infinite speed?

[Anonymous Coward]

The only catastrophe here is your education.

Re:Infinite speed?

[CrimsonAvenger]

Hell, we classify different types of infinities and apple actions to them

Just curious, do we ever pear actions to them? Or even apricot actions to them?

Re:Infinite speed?

[Anonymous Coward]

I would say we date actions, but many here don't.

Re:Infinite speed?

[Anonymous Coward]

You know how jargon is different in different fields. I'm not a mathematician, so I have no idea whether "appling" is actually a thing in the field :). Anyway this is why I love some typos.

Re:Infinite speed?

[ledow]

It's related to pi.

Re:Infinite speed?

[Binestar]

Just curious, do we ever pear actions to them? Or even apricot actions to them?

No. Pears and apricots aren't suitable for actions against infinities due to the extra cost associated with shipping them.

Re:Infinite speed?

[lgw]

Just curious, do we ever pear actions to them?

Quantum entanglement is all about particle pears!

Re:Infinite speed?

[TanjaTheMoogle]

This kind of physics is not physics, It's maths.

I would argue that this isn't about purely mathematical entities. They are talking about photons (a thing in physics; strictly speaking, "photon" has no mathematical meaning). These photons are traveling at a certain speed (m/s, km/h, cm/day....), which is also a physical quantity. I think it's safe to say that they are talking physics, not pure mathematics.

You get credited with EVERYTHING

[Anonymous Coward]

Like EINSTEIN...

sounds totally backwards

[dltaylor]

If the speed of light is dependent on the strength of the gravity field, as we seem to measure today, then the early universe, with all of the matter/energy (yes. that is redundant) should have had such a deep gravity well that the speed of light should have been about 0 for the first few milliseconds of the universe' existence, if not longer.

Re:sounds totally backwards

[NatasRevol]

And one reason why it was so hot - no radiation of heat until the energy overcame the massive gravity well.

Re:sounds totally backwards

[Mes]

As I understand it, there is no gravity in the early universe. For there to be gravity, you need a direction. If all the universe is uniform, every point pulls equally on every other point, so there is no direction to go and you would feel no gravity.

That Einstein's name? Albert Einstein

[wonkey_monkey]

according to a theory that overturns Einstein's century-old claim that the speed of light is a constant

Did Einstein ever make any claims about the speed of light being constant over time, or has a journalist just assumed he must have in order to shoe-horn his name in?

Re:That Einstein's name? Albert Einstein

[Anonymous Coward]

It would be interesting if light always travelled at the speed of light. But it doesn't.

Re:That Einstein's name? Albert Einstein

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not really the speed of light, but a universal speed limit for everything.
While mass are our breaks, so anything without mass (light) will constantly travel at this limit.
Light just happen to be massless, thus will travel at this limit.

Here's someone explaining it better:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=msVuCEs8Ydo

Re:That Einstein's name? Albert Einstein

[Anonymous Coward]

If it's not constant over time what was claiming was constant about it? That's the definition of a constant - it's constant.

Re:That Einstein's name? Albert Einstein

[Anonymous Coward]

He was claiming it was constant as for location and speed of observer. No matter where you are in the universe or traveling (accelerating) at whatever speed, the speed of light will not be different.

Re:That Einstein's name? Albert Einstein

[Anonymous Coward]

the speed of light is constant in every inertial frame of reference.

Re:That Einstein's name? Albert Einstein

[NatasRevol]

While that line is taught in intro quantum mechanics, it was presented before we knew that light changed speed going through a gravity well.

Re:That Einstein's name? Albert Einstein

[Anonymous Coward]

A gravity well isn't an inertial frame of reference. It's an accelerating frame of reference.

Special relative is for references frames that was moving at constant velocities relative to one another.

General relativity is for reference frames accelerating relative to each other.

Re:That Einstein's name? Albert Einstein

[bfpierce]

No, because relativity is more about the measurement of the speed of light being constant between observers in different places/states regardless of how fast/what direction you're moving relative to each other. I don't recall ever reading about an observer in the future and the past being a consideration, but I've been out of the loop for a while.

So unless this article is claiming that two observers in the initial universe would measure two different speeds of light I don't see this overturning 'Einsteins View' of the speed of light.

Re:That Einstein's name? Albert Einstein

[Comrade Ogilvy]

Exactly. Einstein was simply saying that observations were always consistent for any one observer in very certain ways (and not necessarily consistent in other ways we might naively expect). Many of his thought experiments used two observers, in order to elucidate the consistencies and apparent inconsistencies. But the underlying physics is about what is true about any one observer.

There is actually nothing in physics that says so-called physical constants were always the same over time. In fact, there have been ambiguous observations about very distant galaxies twenty five years ago, that have had proposed explanations built around the idea that the speed of light was very very slightly different 6 billion years ago. I do not think that topic has been put to rest because I ran into a blurb about similar work ten years ago. Obviously if there is a measurable tiny change in the speed of light "merely" 6 billion years ago, that is highly suggestive that there could have been a huge difference in the speed of light in the very early universe.

Re:That Einstein's name? Albert Einstein

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm actually enjoying Slashdot today; so many great typos...

"While mass are our breaks, so anything without mass (light) will constantly travel at this limit."
That is one glorious typo; it is even Metaphysical. However...
Light is Photons, and Photons, due to the Energy Mass Equivalence, by definition has Mass. Anything with Mass _can't_ be Accelerated to the Speed of Light, but, especially with the special case of Photons, they can come into existence traveling _at_ the Speed of Light. This is not intuitive, it is a Relativity thing, but it is true. Those are the breaks...

Re:That Einstein's name? Albert Einstein

[lgw]

Did Einstein ever make any claims about the speed of light being constant over time, or has a journalist just assumed he must have in order to shoe-horn his name in?

There's simply no difference between saying the speed of light changes over time, and saying the universe expands or contracts, except to make the math harder.

It much like how the "tired light" idea turns out to be mathematically equivalent to existing physics, just expressed in a way that makes the math harder.

Re:That Einstein's name? Albert Einstein

[TWX]

Actually by definition light travels at the speed of light. What's being argued is that the speed of light itself may not be as constant as we understand it to be right now.

Re:That Einstein's name? Albert Einstein

[Anonymous Coward]

according to a theory that overturns Einstein's century-old claim that the speed of light is a constant

Did Einstein ever make any claims about the speed of light being constant over time, or has a journalist just assumed he must have in order to shoe-horn his name in?

Exactly what is your definition of constant?

(I kid - I actually understand what you mean.)

Re:That Einstein's name? Albert Einstein

[painandgreed]

according to a theory that overturns Einstein's century-old claim that the speed of light is a constant

Did Einstein ever make any claims about the speed of light being constant over time, or has a journalist just assumed he must have in order to shoe-horn his name in?

I believe what he claimed is that the speed of light is the same to all observers. From there you are dealing with frames of reference whose times are related by some transform and possibly what we would call different. Thus if two observers measure the speed of light as the same and are at different times, then the speed of light would be constant over time. That being said, I doubt if he really intended to handle all corner cases such as the time when the entire universe was a singularity or when other laws of physics break down. If the speed of light was different than what we see now, then old light from that time should have certain peculiarities to it. I believe those peculiarities are what they are proposing to look for in the article.

Re:That Einstein's name? Albert Einstein

[Anonymous Coward]

Everyone who writes about science stuff overturns Einstein at least once a year. The high school kid's theory that time is made of particles overturns Einstein. Pop sci writers love to say something overturns Einstein and will lead to faster computers and a cure for cancer, because they don't understand it. They don't understand relativity and it would be much easier for them if it's wrong so they don't have to bother ever understanding it. "It's such confusing bollocks, I knew the first time I saw it it couldn't possibly be right. Speed of light was faster than light before, that makes sense to me, and (apparently, I never looked into it) that explains ALL of the nonsense Einstein wrote about, must be right."

Re:That Einstein's name? Albert Einstein

[Anonymous Coward]

Gravity does not accelerate objects. All pseudo-acceleration caused by Gravity is an inertial frame. If you're in orbit around the Earth, you're in an inertial frame.

Re:That Einstein's name? Albert Einstein

[Trogre]

Yes, and we can change the speed of light ourselves by changing the medium through which it passes. We can even observe particles travelling faster than light within a medium. See Cherenkov radiation for an example of this.

Of course, that has nothing to do with c, which is defined as the speed of light in a vacuum, but interesting nonetheless.

Re:That Einstein's name? Albert Einstein

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not even that complicated. If you say it threatens to overturn Einstein you'll get lots of clicks

Re:You know what this means?

[geekmux]

Faster than light travel is possible! We will be visiting far flung star systems soon. All you need to do is recreate the Big Bang in a local region of space then travel through it. This is the logical conclusion. Signed, Mr. Space Nutter

Nah, what fun is a Big Bang when you can create a black hole instead? Sure, everyone will say your party sucked but still...

uhm

[m76]

Is this the young earth creationist wet dream, that would make it possible for the earth to be 5000 years old?

Re:uhm

[Anonymous Curmudgeon]

Is this the young earth creationist wet dream, that would make it possible for the earth to be 5000 years old?

Definitely not new. I remember reading an article back in the late '80s that followed that line of thinking: that C is constant now, but was faster when first measured, allowing a magical curve that placed earth's age between 5,700 and 10,000 years old.

Theory or hypothesis?

[Roodvlees]

Christians often get criticized for saying evolution is only a theory.
When a theory is really very well supported by evidence, as evolution is.
But can we really complain when something like this, which is clearly an hypothesis, is called a theory.
"String theory" seems the biggest offender to me.
No wonder people tend to describe any idea they have as a theory.

Re:Theory or hypothesis?

[Joce640k]

Christians often get criticized for saying evolution is only a theory.
When a theory is really very well supported by evidence, as evolution is.
But can we really complain when something like this, which is clearly an hypothesis, is called a theory.
"String theory" seems the biggest offender to me.
No wonder people tend to describe any idea they have as a theory.

Huh?

"Theory" is simply the name given to the second step of the Scientific Method. That's it.

Christians are criticized because they don't understand that the method doesn't stop there, that there's still a couple of steps to go ("prediction" and "experiment"). It's these other two steps that make the difference between proper science and woo-woo.

Re:Theory or hypothesis?

[Anonymous Coward]

Christians often get criticized for saying evolution is only a theory.

I want to point out that it is a sub-set of Christians that are getting hung-up over this issue. It is most certainly not a majority view among Christians. It is unfortunate they also seem to be the most vocal Christian group, because the rest of us feel like we're getting tarred with the same brush. It's also giving a lot of non-Christian folk a very bad image of Christianity.

To be clear: Creationism vs Evolution is a non-issue to most Christians.

To the rest of us, the whole thing with Creationism is actually starting to feel like almost cult-like. I'd compare it with those guys who preach that you should handle poisonous snakes or the nutters who persecuted Galileo. They're taking a specific piece from in the Bible, twisting it out of context and turning it a major pillar of faith.

Christianity isn't supposed to work that way. There is only one pillar of faith, and that's a belief in Jesus. As for the rest: sure, it's there and open for debate; you might even have some valid points, but don't get dogmatic about it.

Re:Theory or hypothesis?

[Anonymous Coward]

"Theory" is simply the name given to the second step of the Scientific Method. That's it.

No, you're making the same mistake that OP is talking about. You're thinking of a hypothesis. A theory is a collection of observations, laws, and relationships that, collectively, describe a system. Thus it is technically correct for string theory to use that word, but OP's gripe with that is the inability to test it.

A "law" in science is nothing more than a mathematical equation that describes a particular observation--and it may be right or wrong. Newton's "law" of gravity is certainly not right, but it is useful under specific approximations (as are all scientific "laws").

The word "theory" implies nothing about incorrectness, and the word "law" implies nothing about correctness. We'd avoid a lot more argument in this world if people would just learn what these two words mean.

Re:Theory or hypothesis?

[Comrade Ogilvy]

I partially agree, but the underlying issue is that many words have multiple definitions and which meaning should be clear from context. Scientists cannot police every journalist's and every layman's language, or they will get dinged for being even more highfallutin' than they already are. In this case, the meaning is adequately clear, even if the language is imperfect.

In this context, String Theory and Fast Light Theory are understood as speculative theories, that are more developed than simply a hypothesis but much less so than a well tested theory like Evolution. At least their status is well understood by practicing scientists.

To be more explicit, String Theory and Fast Light Theory are complex and carefully developed speculative ideas that (hopefully) generate testable hypotheses. That is why they do not quite fit into the word "hypothesis". If not "hypothesis", what word we we choose? Is there a word for something in between "hypothesis" and "theory"? Neither choice is 100% correct here.

I would further note that practicing physicists sometimes say out loud that String Theory is not (yet) quite real science due to a lack of testable hypotheses.

For your other point, a certain small subset of Christians like to play word games, by purposefully misunderstanding the meaning of words as easily properly interpreted in context, as a tactic to avoid discussing the meat of the issues.

Re:Theory or hypothesis?

[Anonymous Coward]

I would like to expand on your point; it's not wrong, it's as Science Wonks like to say, incomplete:
""Theory" is simply the name given to the second step of the Scientific Method. That's it."
Oppenheimer liked to tell his "Project Science" Kids, (Frank, not his more famous brother, Robert.), that Science, and the Scientific Method, is Iterative, an ever expanding Spiral of knowledge and insight, with the wrong stuff tossed out of the Spiral path, much as Ions of not just the right Mass or Energy get tossed out of a Cyclotron's Spiral Orbit. (Cyclotron Resonance. Many years after Frank, I spent a decade or so working on Cyclotron Resonance...)
So: Theory, Hypothesis, Research, Experiment, Conclusion, leading to a modified Theory, Hypothesis, Research, Experiment, Conclusion, leading to a modified Theory ... and it never ends. Even "Bad" Theories have their uses. Al Ghiorso used to joke that he got things right maybe ten percent of the time, but his real work was in the other ninety percent.

"Christians are criticized because they don't understand that the method doesn't stop there, that there's still a couple of steps to go ("prediction" and "experiment")."
Theories in Science are _never_ complete. Religious Concepts, unless constantly scrutinized and refined, are by very definition Unscientific, thus Theories and the Scientific Method have no place in Dogmatic Religion. Surprisingly, the Catholic Church agrees. Monsignor Georges Lemaître was the leading Proponent of the Big Bang Theory, which is now, and shall always be, Incomplete... which the Catholic Church has no problem with, just as they have no problem with the Theory of Evolution. This is tricky to explain, but it goes something like this:
Incomplete Scientific Theories leave _just_ enough wiggle room for Doubt, thus there just might be a God, and then Jesus... for those that can't accept him/them on just Faith alone. (Aside from other Teachers like Frank, I was gotten hold of by the Jesuits for a time. Man, those Dudes really could convince you, and themselves, that we saw five Lights or Fingers, when only four were shown. Many years later I met "Brother" Michael again, when he was finishing up his Doctoral work in Astrophysics at Berkeley, now married and working under Muller.)
Although I mentioned the Catholic Church, they aren't the only Religious community that has no issues with Science or the Scientific Method, but they are a pretty good example. Of all the Physicists that I've known, Episcopalians, Jews, and even Muslims were well represented. Pentecostals... not so much. (Not at all, except for some Technicians.)

I'd like to wrap up with a Cartoon by Sidney Harris, poking gentle fun at Scientists who aren't quite Methodical enough:
https://avionod.files.wordpress.com/2009/04/then-a-miracle-happens.gif?w=490

Re:Theory or hypothesis?

[Joce640k]

I would like to expand on your point; it's not wrong, it's as Science Wonks like to say, incomplete:

""Theory" is simply the name given to the second step of the Scientific Method. That's it."

So: Theory, Hypothesis, Research, Experiment, Conclusion

Not to nitpick, but ... "Theory" is the second step. The first step is "Observation".

Also, what happened to "Prediction"? A theory is worthless unless it makes predictions about the outcomes of future experiments.

Re:Theory or hypothesis?

[Anonymous Coward]

Christians often get criticized for saying evolution is only a theory.

I want to point out that it is a sub-set of Christians that are getting hung-up over this issue. >/quote>

I'd like to join in and add that there it is a characteristic of the media to select the most oddball/extreme members of any group and repeatedly present those as being typical examples of the group as well as presenting the views of the outliers as being mainstream.

Re:Theory or hypothesis?

[Roodvlees]

Thanks, I like your definition of these words, makes sense. Maybe I should take things more lightly, it's better if words never provide authority.
The problem of people respecting authority too much is separate and worth fighting anyway.

Re:You know what this means?

[110010001000]

I didn't study much science but I think that the Big Bang, blackholes and wormholes are mostly the same thing with different CGI effects.

Signed,
Mr. Space Nutter

1bn km/h

[Overzeetop]

Of course, because when I think of physics and the speed of light km/h is the unit I work with the most. And yet we wonder where Brexit and Donald Trump came from.

Re:1bn km/h

[Anonymous Coward]

Exactly.
And WTF is a trillion? 10^12, 10^15, or 10^18?

Re:1bn km/h

[NatasRevol]

Depends on what continent you're on.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

        Trillion (short scale) (1,000,000,000,000; one million million; 1012; SI prefix: tera-), the current meaning in both American and British English
        Trillion (long scale) (1,000,000,000,000,000,000; one million million million; 1018; SI prefix: exa-), the former meaning in British English and current usage in some non-English-speaking countries

Re:1bn km/h

[jgullstr]

And yet we wonder where Brexit and Donald Trump came from.

From the two most prominent countries still using mph?

So there's something faster than plaid?

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow. Learn something new every day!

Re:You know what this means?

[Anonymous Coward]

Reminds of the famous quote "Only two things are infinite, ..."

in canada we call this a fudge factor

[Anonymous Coward]

not to be confused with a fudgecicle which is what you get when you shit outdoors at the speed of light.

Sheldrake's idea - proposed years ago

[Anonymous Coward]

Rupert Sheldrake is an incredibly insightful and intelligent man who figured this out by comparing historical measurements of the speed of light and noticed very small variation. Of course, as he was not part of the scientific "elite", such groundbreaking, status-quo-destroying discoveries were not allowed for him, so he was quickly and effectively humiliated and declared persona non grata, basically ruining his further career. Now some bottom feeder dug up Sheldrake's research and is trying to steal his achievements for himself. He will probably succeed, just like Einstein did with De Pretto's research. Only frauds are allowed to succeed.

Re:Sheldrake's idea - proposed years ago

[Anonymous Coward]

Hi Rupert, I was telepathically informed you were here. Want to have lunch?

Deepak

Re:You know what this means?

[Anonymous Coward]

Eagleworks is working on it with an Emdrive v2.0

Re:You know what this means?

[Anonymous Coward]

you need to get a life... who has time to post all day long? A loser.

Alternate theory

[Anonymous Coward]

God placed lamps everywhere in the universe so he could see as he was building it.

Well..

[uohcicds]

It always struck me (even as an undergrad 25 years ago when we were talking about SR and GR) that this could be the case - that c could be "instanteously" or "episodically" constant, but need not have been the same value for ever. It's not unreasonable to suppose that the value of c could look like a decay curve, or some function whose value tends to the limit we are now seeing over time from some earlier maximum. I just never got around to asking anyone why not at the time - pity. I suppsoe it goes back to a calculus way fo thinking for me - at any instant in some changing system, even things which are changing may appear from within that system to have fixed, immutable values, even if that's not what they truly are.

Re:Well..

[Anonymous Coward]

It always struck me (even as an undergrad 25 years ago when we were talking about SR and GR) that this could be the case - that c could be "instanteously" or "episodically" constant, but need not have been the same value for ever. It's not unreasonable to suppose that the value of c could look like a decay curve, or some function whose value tends to the limit we are now seeing over time from some earlier maximum. I just never got around to asking anyone why not at the time - pity.

I suppsoe it goes back to a calculus way fo thinking for me - at any instant in some changing system, even things which are changing may appear from within that system to have fixed, immutable values, even if that's not what they truly are.

Well since we use C, the speed of light in a vacuum, as the universal yard stick, how would we know? You can't see the yardstick stretch or shrink, when you and everything you can sense stretch and shrink exactly the same. Look at the lengths LIGO has to go through just to measure a little local hiccup in time-space.

Re:You know what this means?

[Anonymous Coward]

Guy, stop. Really stop. No one even quoted or thought of getting travel faster than light from the article, just you. Go back to your room

Creation proven?

[freak0fnature]

If light and other particles could travel and infinite speeds during the creation of the universe....wouldn't that throw off all methods of dating the universe? In fact, wouldn't that make Biblical creation very plausible?

Re:Creation proven?

[MrLogic17]

My first thought was that yes, it would throw off pining down a date for the Big Bang.

As for Biblical creation, do keep in mind that the story starts with "the face of God moving over the deep". The earth, formless and void though it be, existed before day 1. The universe was created, and was in place for an undetermined period of time before the 7 days of creation.

If you consider the frame of reference, the surface of the earth, the 7 days of creation play out logically. You can't see the sun or moon until the atmosphere is cleaned up and put to into a usable-for-life state, for example.

$0.02. Opinions on the topic are many and varied.

Re:Creation proven?

[110010001000]

Creationist nutter detected. No, it wouldn't throw off anything. They are saying that the speed of light was temporarily infinite for a VERY SMALL FRACTION of a second. Just f*ck off.

Re:Creation proven?

[Jogar the Barbarian]

Just f*ck off.

Wow. Your powers of rhetoric are stunning. I had better believe everything you say if I know what's good for me.

Re: Creation proven?

[Anonymous Coward]

Donald Trump is that you? The debate tactic of insulting your opponent rather than talking about issues certainly fits. The hate level certainly is present. I'm pretty sure Mr binary is #therealdonald.

Re:Creation proven?

[david_thornley]

If the speed of light is infinite, how would you measure time? Pretty much everything above the level of quantum mechanics is run by electromagnetic forces, which would propagate infinitely fast, so what sort of clock could you have?

Not plausible

[sjbe]

In fact, wouldn't that make Biblical creation very plausible?

No. There is nothing that would make creation as "described" in the bible plausible. The bible is a man made fable with no evidential support whatsoever made in a time when man lacked the technological capacity to make necessary observations. The bible makes no testable predictions nor does it describe any observed events. Any similarity to actual observations and scientific theories is purely coincidental.

Speed of light is zero point?

[Anonymous Coward]

I always saw the speed of light as the minimum speed instead of the maximum speed. For example, from the moment the sun releases a photon, it's the photon that stands still, while it is the solar system that 'falls' to the place where the photon once was created (falling as in the theory of gravity), while the sun falls towards the black hole (or whatever cluster it belongs to). Since space is constantly expanding, the speed at witch space expands is what we call the speed of light. However around heavy objects, space doesn't expand as fast while around black holes space doesn't expand at all. Because space doesn't expand at a black hole, it seems that time has stopped at the horizon (the expansion is equal to zero or the speed of light), and moves slower the closer it gets to a black hole.

This also kind of explains why a photon can appear anywhere you measure a photon. It was created at a point, but because the space expands, that point where the photon was has expanded, including the photon itself. The photon can be at any place until you measure it after which the light wave collapses.

That is what I fantasized about the speed of light and the space time continuum. Since I was just an average and shy student, I never dared to talk about it. It's is something I always wanted to ask during college: What if the speed of light isn't the maximum speed, but the minimum speed or zero point while what we measure is the expansion of space time continuum?

Re:Speed of light is zero point?

[110010001000]

I have a hard time believing you were an average student.

Particle wave duality

[sjbe]

This was my thought... a photon is a particle, that travels in a wave.

Stop right there. Your understanding of particle wave duality is incomplete. Go back and study before you continue. MinutePhysics has some excellent videos on the topic.

Re:You know what this means?

[110010001000]

Bullshit. The EmDrive nutters just haven't woken up yet.

Does this account for dark energy?

[Dan East]

I'm trying to understand how this affects the redshifting of extremely distant objects.

Pretty much any distant stars / galaxies we look at from earth are redshifted, which indicates they are moving away from us. However we know we aren't the center of the universe (where the big bang happened), but that any observer at any other point would see the same affect we see - everything far away is redshifted. This is why we think the universe is expanding - because everything distant is redshifted. Further, the expansion of the universe seems to be increasing, which has resulted in the theory of dark energy to explain why the universe is expanding faster and faster.

However, if the speed of light is slowing, wouldn't it result in the opposite affect (blueshifting)? Photons en route to us from other distant objects (and thus that have been travelling for a very long period of time) are now moving slower than they were at first, according to the theory of this article. If the speed of light is slowing, then that would decrease the wavelength / increase the frequency, which would blueshift, right? Further, the universe isn't just expanding at a static rate, but the expansion is accelerating, hence the theory of dark energy. According to this theory is that explained by the fact that c is still decreasing? If c is decreasing does that mean that the rate of time is also decreasing? Or must that not be the case or otherwise the speed of light would not seem to be changing?

Re:Does this account for dark energy?

[110010001000]

Assuming you are serious: only Creationist nutters believe that the speed of light is slowing down. The theory here is that the speed of light was infinite at the start of the Big Bang, not that it is slowing down. The speed of light is not slowing down, and this has already been proven.

Re:Does this account for dark energy?

[Dan East]

The theory here is that the speed of light was infinite at the start of the Big Bang, not that it is slowing down. The speed of light is not slowing down, and this has already been proven.

So the speed of light was infinite, but now it is not. That is the very definition of "slowing down" is it not? At which point did it slow down I suppose is my question. If this theory can replace the concept of expansion, then it also must explain the acceleration of the expansion, which is what dark energy is theorized to do. So this theory must somehow take into account dark energy as well, which infers that the speed of light must still be changing since expansion is still accelerating.

Another part of this theory doesn't make sense. If the speed of something is infinite, then the size of the universe must also be infinite to accommodate it, otherwise it would "bunch up" as it hits whatever the "every corner of the cosmos" means (which implies there is a finite size to the universe).

However if you spread a finite amount of energy / matter over an infinite distance, the density would approach zero, thus we would not even perceive that it exists. So I guess this theory assumes there is a finite size to the universe that is independent of the amount of distance or expansion that could happen at the speed of light.

Re:Does this account for dark energy?

[PvtVoid]

However we know we aren't the center of the universe (where the big bang happened)

In the Big Bang picture, the universe has no center, and the Big Bang did not happen in it. The Big Bang happened everywhere in space at once.

Re:Does this account for dark energy?

[Comrade Ogilvy]

The big differences in the speed of light presumably occurred in the first picoseconds of the universe, long before there was anything like a galaxy (or even a stable atom). Very likely, almost all the slowing down of the speed of light occurred within seconds of the beginning of the universe. But the redshift numbers we seen from the most distant galaxies galaxies record events from a several billion year old galaxy.

BTW, there has been some ambiguous data about very distant galaxies that could be interpreted as a tiny, tiny change in the speed of light. The proposed changes in the speed of light are far too small to have the kind of effect you are suggesting.

Re:Does this account for dark energy?

[Quince alPillan]

However if you spread a finite amount of energy / matter over an infinite distance, the density would approach zero, thus we would not even perceive that it exists.

This assumes an even distribution of mass / matter / energy. If the distribution weren't even (because another unstable force, like gravity, caused it to collect together) you would see vast swaths of "empty" space and clumps of matter / energy as it collected together.

Also consider that "speed" is a function of distance over time and "time" is actually space/time and altered by gravity. It could very well be that the qualities of time did not exist as it does today, making the speed of light infinite.

The guardian has

[Anonymous Coward]

The guardian also has an article written by Godfrey Elfwick (or maybe not?). I'd source this one elsewhere guys :)

Black holes in early universe?

[sjbe]

So a black hole forms when matter is condensed into a sufficiently small space so that even light cannot escape because gravity bends spacetime so much that there is no path to get outside the event horizon. Assuming the big bang theory is plausible, early in the universe the universe would (presumably) be incredibly dense with matter for some period of time. So how is it that having all that matter so close together didn't results in nothing but a bunch of black holes? How does the big bang theory get around much/all of the matter in the universe collapsing into a black hole in the early universe? What was different about spacetime to allow this to happen?

Re:Black holes in early universe?

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't have the best answer for you, but one answer is that by a twisted definition, the Universe is a black hole -- light, or anything else can't get out of it. Same now as back then... Just because you are in a "black hole" doesn't mean that you don't experience a lot of structure and action within it. There is a difference between a black hole and a gravitational singularity (which modern physics can't address).

Re:Black holes in early universe?

[painandgreed]

So a black hole forms when matter is condensed into a sufficiently small space so that even light cannot escape because gravity bends spacetime so much that there is no path to get outside the event horizon. Assuming the big bang theory is plausible, early in the universe the universe would (presumably) be incredibly dense with matter for some period of time. So how is it that having all that matter so close together didn't results in nothing but a bunch of black holes? How does the big bang theory get around much/all of the matter in the universe collapsing into a black hole in the early universe? What was different about spacetime to allow this to happen?

Space was expanding. There is plenty of evidence from different directions to indicate that this is what happened. It was expanding fast enough to over come the effects of gravity. It's still expanding and that's how we get red shifting today. Why did this happen? Well, that's because *cough* *cough* *mumble into a corner*. My guess at a simple answer that can be written down in a post in a place like /. is that it came from other dimensions. Just like they say that before the big bang, there was no time or space, there possibly was something, just not the something we know. These are the other dimensions that string theorists talk about and the current idea is that they are getting smaller to make our space get bigger, like that experiment with two unequally sized balloons and the smaller one continues to shrink and force it's air into the larger one (because of differences of surface pressures of the two balloons).

Re:Black holes in early universe?

[Anonymous Coward]

Blackholes are not caused by a high density of mass but a strong curvature of space-time. Even if all of space-time is super dense, there is no curvature because it is uniformly dense. Like all things in nature, you need a gradient to make anything happen.

Re Inflation

[NEDHead]

Always safe to credit Hawking for cosmological theory, but a gratuitous mention might have better used Alan Guth

Relativity deniers!!!!

[0xdeaddead]

Science is about consensus, not challenging dogma?

Re:Relativity deniers!!!!

[PvtVoid]

Science is about consensus, not challenging dogma?

If you look at Maguejo's theory, you will find that it is consistent with everything we knew before about relativity. It is not: "ZOMG! Einstein was WRONG!", rather "We noticed it is possible to extend relativity theory in a way which accommodates a variable speed of light, yet reproduces other known physics perfectly." Look up dilaton theories, for example.

Re:Relativity deniers!!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

It not about challenging "dogma" either. It is a process where a theory is put together and tested to see if it is seems right (and tested and tested again). You can test even what is presumed to be true all you want. Nobody is really going to stop you. But if you insist on contracting what seems right (based on past tests), you need to show that those tests are wrong or insufficient. And maybe explain why they are wrong if you can.

If you can find a mistake in what is established as "truth", you may get a Nobel or other prize for it. With political or religious dogma, you get a bullet in the head or other punishments.

So they think light is god?

[Anonymous Coward]

Infinite speed is basically definition of god. You are at the same time everywhere. The same photon in every single point in space.

Re:You know what this means?

[serviscope_minor]

Bullshit. The EmDrive nutters just haven't woken up yet.

'fraid they have. One particularly delusional one is busy arguing with an AC he's convinced is me. Hi TheDarkMaster if you're reading.

Re:You know what this means?

[garyoa1]

Yabutt that still doezn't explain Penny.
Just sayin...

The Matthew Effect

[FranklinWebber]

Crediting Hawking for inflation is yet another example of the Matthew Effect.

More specific credit could have gone to Guth, Linde, and Starobinsky who won the Kavli Prize for "pioneering the theory of cosmic inflation" but who's heard of them?

Re:The Matthew Effect

[Actually, I do RTFA]

Crediting Hawking for inflation is yet another example of the Matthew Effect.

So is crediting Einstein for the idea that light, in a vacuum, moves at a constant speed. In fact, that was the assumption he used, which then caused him to invent special relativity and general relativity to explain away paradoxes that arose from reconciling that rule with, you know, non-quantum physics.

Re:The Matthew Effect

[Anonymous Coward]

No comment about the Matthew effect, but yes, this is a story about Alan Guth

Overturned? More like explaining an edge case.

[bfpierce]

c as a constant is derived from Maxwell's equations, held as invariant in a vacuum.

If that were true everywhere we wouldn't be looking at trying to find a GUT.

Would not in the least surprise me that relativity doesn't hold at the beginning of the Universe, considering I can't imagine Maxwell's equations used in that derivation being true there either.

But didn't Einstein say light speed varies sorta?

[EricTDuckman1414]

But didn't Einstein say light speed varies in his paper "On the Influence of Gravitation on the Propagation of Light "?

From the proposition which has just been proved, that the velocity of light in the gravitational field is a function of the location, we may easily infer, by means of Huygens's principle, that light-rays propagated across a gravitational field undergo deflection.

? Is this like Snell's law of refraction, but with the refraction causing variation in the speed of light caused by a gravitational field instead of a change in the density of the media that the light wave is passing through? Could this mean that gravity is caused by a change in the density of space around a massive object, rather than its "warping" of space? Is it possible that the only actual physical substance in the universe is the media we know as space, with both energy and mass existing as transverse and longitudinal waves in that media?

Wrong guy, it wasn't Einstein.

[Anonymous Coward]

" according to a theory that overturns Einstein's century-old claim that the speed of light is a constant."

It was James Clerk Maxwell who predicted and proved and explained why the Speed of Light was a constant for any given medium.

Re:Wrong guy, it wasn't Einstein.

[Anonymous Coward]

Too bad the Scientific Method has never proven anything ... ever.

New theory

[Anonymous Coward]

My new theory is: The even distribution of bull shit on the internet proves that if a pseudoscience article's bull shit density is beyond a testable number, then its speed of dissemination surpasses the speed of logic, approaching infinite speed on Slashdot.

What if the speed of light ...

[PortHaven]

What if the speed of light is related to the size of the universe? However perception and size is also related.

So the universe is expanding. What affect does that have on perceived speeds?

What if the speed of light is relational to size of the universe? Would it cover more distance in a smaller universe? If so, does that mean C was faster? This is where the normal brain starts to spin wheels a bit.

But it's a lot of fun. And I'll be highly amused if their experiment bears support for their theory. As I first heard this theory decades ago.

That didn't happen!

[Anonymous Coward]

Light did not move at infinite speed. I could have moved MUCH faster than 2.99E08 m/s but not INFINITE! Are physicists stupid?? First of all, if something moved at infinite speed, it would be an infinite distance away in the tiniest fraction of a fraction of a second. Secondly, it would never have been able to slow down.

I always expected this

[s122604]

How else could the universe be more than 6000 light years across when it was all created 6000 years ago by YHWH

Re:I always expected this

[vandamme]

"For a thousand years in your sight are like a day..." Ps. 90:4

OK, a little off, that's only 2.19 billion years. Somebody moved a decimal point.

Speed of light is not affected by gravity

[sjbe]

If the speed of light is dependent on the strength of the gravity field

It's not. Speed of light is a constant. Gravity affects its trajectory but not its speed.

should have had such a deep gravity well that the speed of light should have been about 0 for the first few milliseconds of the universe' existence

All that matter would affect its path but (so far) there is no evidence that gravity affects the speed of light at all or that it ever did. The reason light cannot escape a black hole isn't that gravity is pulling on the photon so hard but rather because gravity warps spacetime so much that there is literally no path for light to take which can get beyond the event horizon. It's kind of like being in a maze with no exit.

Re:Speed of light is not affected by gravity

[Anonymous Coward]

Does mass affect the speed at which electromagnetic radiation propagates through a vacuum? How long after the "Big Bang" did it take for particles to acquire mass (i.e. - when did the Higgs field or the Higgs boson come into existence? Presumably some time after the Big Bang?)

Re:You know what this means?

[lgw]

Have you accepted Jesus Christ into your life as your personal savior?

You're about as fun to be around as the guys who turn every conversation into pushing their religion on you. Really, just stop.

Re:You know what this means?

[Anonymous Coward]

>black hole instead? Sure, everyone will say your party sucked but still...

No, NO: nobody will ever LEAVE!

Universal constants

[sjbe]

Why would anything in the universe be constant?

Why wouldn't something be constant? Equally valid question. So far we have observed some things that seem to remain constant. Why that is the case is a separate and interesting question. We also have models based on those constants that fit really, really well with our observations.

Maybe the variability is beyond our ability to observe.

Perhaps but it's kind of hard to make rational scientific models and predictions about something that cannot be even theoretically observed. You're getting outside of science at that point.

Re:Universal constants

[Anonymous Coward]

Shhh! You'll upset the string theorists!

Expanding Universe

[Anonymous Coward]

Doesn't the expanding universe account for the even distribution of light with the background radiation?
Light would not have had to traveln the early moments of the universe, or in fact travel at all in the beginning if the universe was actually just a singularity. As the universe expanded, light wouldn't have to travel to any far corner of the universe because it was already there.