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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."
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.
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)
God said, "div D = rho, div B = 0, curl E = -@B/@t, curl H = J + @D/@t," and there was light.
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"
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.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
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.
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.