Via Slashdot, The Age: Einstein's relativity theory hits a speed bump.
Motion, it turns out, slows time - one of the funny effects of the law of relativity. At low speeds, the effect is slight and makes no difference to our daily lives.
We had no idea to look for such effects until the 26-year-old Albert Einstein walked into the office of Annalen der Physik journal in Bern, Switzerland, in 1905, gave the editor his paper on the special theory of relativity and asked that it be printed "if you can find room for it".
Einstein, who died in 1955, is still regarded as perhaps the greatest mind ever. The remarkable thing about his discoveries was that he literally sat in his flat in Bern during his spare time while working as a clerk at the patent office and thought it all up using sheer brain power. Only later were his theories proved, repeatedly, through experiment and observation.
Dr Charley Lineweaver, one of Davies' co-authors, along with graduate student Tamara Davis, explains that their paper works the other way around. They have taken observations and plugged the data into known mathematical formulas to determine that the speed of light has slowed.
"When I first heard about these observations . . . I was, frankly, not only sceptical about it, I was appalled," Davies says. "I thought it was horrible. The last thing we wanted in theoretical physics was to have something like this."
It is hair-curling science. They looked at light from the most distant objects in the universe, quasars up to a billion times the size of our sun, which are 10 billion or 12 billion light years away.
Also via Madville, ABCNews.com: Inconstant Speed of Light May Debunk Einstein.
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.
"But two of the cherished laws of the universe are the law that electron charge shall not change and that the speed of light shall not change, so whichever way you look at it we're in trouble," Davies said.
"When one of the cornerstones of physics collapses, it's not obvious what you hang onto and what you discard," Davies said.
"If what we're seeing is the beginnings of a paradigm shift in physics like what happened 100 years ago with the theory of relativity and quantum theory, it is very hard to know what sort of reasoning to bring to bear."
This is great. Just today I was thinking about how much of the physics of the universe we have left to understand, and I figured it wasn't much. Now this happens!
This is great, because it seems to fit right in with what Dr. D. Russel Humphries writes in his book, Starlight and Time. I'm listening to some interviews with him now.
Thursday, August 8, 2002
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