Was Einstein wrong? (1 Viewer)

It could be that the possible change in light speed will only matter in the study of the large scale structure of the universe, its origins and evolution.

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Who knows, maybe 1000 years from now he will be considered a crackpot since all of his theories had been shot to hell.

Ain't gonna happen, because his theory has a huge (HUGE!) amount of experimental evidence that support it. Just because the speed of light may not be constant doesn't mean all of a sudden that atom bombs will stop working.
It is annoying that the article uses silly words like "dogma" and "sancrosanct" and "violating laws". Obviously written by a journalist who has no clue what science is. Must have been a slow news day at Wired. :rolleyes

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The suggestion that the speed of light can change is based on data collected by UNSW astronomer John Webb, who posed a conundrum when he found that light from a distant quasar, a star-like object, had absorbed the wrong type of photons from interstellar clouds on its 12 billion year journey to earth.

Davies said fundamentally Webb's observations meant that the structure of atoms emitting quasar light was slightly but ever so significantly different to the structure of atoms in humans.

The discrepancy could only be explained if either the electron charge, or the speed of light, had changed.

Anybody want to try and disect what he's speaking of here? I don't get it.

Are they taking into account that the speed of light is constant only in a vacuum, and that it varies when traveling through "stuff" (e.g. water)? Surely, they've done their homework, and accounted for all the dark matter between said quasar and here (where they measure it)?

Hmm...not ready to give up on Einstein yet.

Todd

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Hmm...not ready to give up on Einstein yet.

Smart!

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The suggestion that the speed of light can change is based on data collected by UNSW astronomer John Webb, who posed a conundrum when he found that light from a distant quasar, a star-like object, had absorbed the wrong type of photons from interstellar clouds on its 12 billion year journey to earth.

I believe that what John Webb discovered is that the intervening clouds absorbed unexpected wavelengths of light, not that the light “absorbed” photons as it passed through the intervening clouds, as the writer suggests.

If this is the case, then the problem is fairly easy to understand. If you’ve ever played with a glow-in-the-dark toy or sticker, you’ve seen this phenomenon, at least indirectly. When you hold the glow-in-the-dark toy up to a light, it absorbs a certain frequency of light that excites the electrons into a higher-energy orbit. When the toy is placed in the dark, the electrons release that energy, giving off light as the electrons fall into a lower-energy orbit. Although we can’t directly measure the frequency of light our toy absorbs, it’s easy to determine the frequency of light being emitted by our toy. (Mine’s green!). While you can’t readily detect the frequency of light being absorbed, it is not hard to imagine what could be determined if you could. By determining the frequency of light being absorbed, you could calculate the amount of energy required to rip the electrons from their orbits. And that energy is directly proportional to the charge of the electron (and of the proton, though the article fails to mention that fact). The higher the frequency, the more energy required to displace the electron. If we place our glow-in-the-dark toy in intergalactic space and allow photons from distant quasars to pass through it, we could determine what frequencies of light are absorbed by the toy, and we’d expect the frequencies to be the same as those measured here on Earth using a similar toy and a flashlight.

Ah, but it’s not at all that easy. With light being red-shifted both from the relative movement of distant objects and from the expansion of space that’s occurred over the past 12 billion years, it’s difficult enough just to know what to account for in both emission and absorption spectra frequency shifts. Add to that the fact that the relative motion between the quasar and intervening clouds will shift the absorption spectra independent of whatever red shift is introduced to the emission spectra. If the cloud and the quasar are moving toward each other, then the absorption spectra will be red-shifted to us (since the light is blue-shifted relative to the cloud). If they are moving away from each other, the absorption spectra will be blue shifted. To me, this alone could account for any discrepancy between emission and absorption spectra shift we might detect. So I can’t begin to imagine how to determine what component of shift or lack of shift of absorption spectra could be due to a change in the speed of light when so many other factors causing/mitigating frequency shift come into play. I’m sure Mr. (Dr.?) Webb knows what he’s doing, but his research is definitely out of my league.

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