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At the risk of initiating an off-topic metaphysical discussion, this begs
the question:

What is time?

Robert

----- Original Message -----
From: "Peter Fogg" 
To: 
Sent: Friday, May 06, 2005 3:03 AM
Subject: Time slowing down?


> This article was originally published in Britain's 'The Guardian'
> newspaper.
> This excerpt comes from Melbourne's 'The Age'
>
> http://www.theage.com.au/news/Science/Experts-challenge-Einstein-over-speed-
> of-light/2005/04/11/1113071911054.html
>
> copied here since the online version may require registration before
> access.
>
> "A century after Albert Einstein published his most famous ideas,
> physicists
> are commemorating the occasion by trying to demolish one of them.
> Astronomers were to tell experts gathering at Warwick University in
> England
> overnight to celebrate the anniversary of the great man's "miracle year"
> that the speed of light - Einstein's unchanging yardstick that underpins
> his
> special theory of relativity - might be slowing down.
> Michael Murphy, of the Institute of Astronomy at Cambridge University,
> said:
> "We are claiming something extraordinary here. The findings suggest there
> is
> a more fundamental theory of the way that light and matter interact; and
> that special relativity, at its foundation, is actually wrong."
> Einstein's insistence that the speed of light was always the same set up
> many of his big ideas and established the bedrock of modern physics. Dr
> Murphy said: "It could turn out that special relativity is a very good
> approximation but it's missing a little bit. That little bit may be the
> doorknob to a whole new universe and a whole new set of fundamental laws."
> His team did not measure a change in the speed of light directly. Instead,
> they analysed flickering light from very distant celestial objects called
> quasars.
> Their light takes billions of years to travel to Earth, letting
> astronomers
> see the fundamental laws of the universe at work during its earliest days.
> The observations, from the Keck telescope in Hawaii, suggest the way
> certain
> wavelengths of light are absorbed has changed.
> If true, it means that a measure of the strength of the electromagnetic
> force that holds atoms together has changed by about 0.001 per cent since
> the big bang. The speed of light depends on this measure. If one varies
> with
> time then the other probably does too, meaning Einstein got it wrong. If
> light moved faster in the early universe than now, physicists would have
> to
> rethink many fundamental theories.
> Dr Murphy's conclusions are based on work carried out in 2001 with John
> Webb
> at the University of NSW. Other astronomers disputed the findings, and a
> smaller study using a different telescope last year suggested no change.
> Dr Murphy's team is analysing the results from the largest experiment so
> far, using light from 143 bright stellar objects."
>
> - Guardian

   

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