einstein ?

[kotake]

The strength of atomic and nuclear interactions depend on the value of c. If it changes' date=' it makes chemical and nuclear interactions different. And yet there's plenty of evidence that stars shined in the past, since the light we see is old, and there was a natural reactor on earth 2 billion years ago.

 

It's quite possible that some interactions would start or stop happening if the value of c changed, or the rates would change.[/quote']

There are some observations which apparently support this new theory of the changing c, as the magazine writes.

 

I: Some very distant quasars have been observed with the Keck telescopes, and the line spectra which occur when their light passes through gass clouds of Fe, Cr and Ni are somewhat shifted from the ones we would expect. The placement of the lines depends on the speed of light.

 

II: The temperature on WMAP's picture of the universe at the age of 380 000 years seems to be distributed evenly throughout the whole, which suggests that all the areas have been in contact with each other. These areas were at a distance of several millions of light years apart, yet due to the age, the radiation could only have moved 380 000 light years.

 

III: In a uranium mine in Oklo in West Africa there seems to have been a fision process about 1,8 billions years ago, because the amount of U-235 was too small compared to what we would expect otherwise. After analyzing the remnants of the reaction one can find a value for c. Some calculations show that there is a deviation from our current value.

 

 

That is what the magazine writes. Of course, these results might be normal deviations. I know too little, so what do you people think?

[swansont]

Do they truly depend on the value of c, or do the equations we've developed to model the interactions depend on c? I'm asking because I don't know. But you should realize that there is a difference.

 

The difference is philosphical. Are the models we have of nature actually physically correct? Does it matter if that's the way nature actually behaves?

 

Models are what we have. We can't know if they truly depend on c, or other constants, because we can't change the values. That's why they are called constants.

[Saint]

All I'm saying is that while the constant "c" may appear in many of our models, the physical connection between c and the interactions we're modeling may not physically exist. Since most of our models are based on validation through observation, we can use many terms that may not have any bearing on the physical reality of the interaction being modelled. I realize this is the best we can do in many cases, but we should be careful when making the statement that changing one of our "constants" would alter the physical reality of an interaction. That statement requires a deeper understanding of the physical reality, not just the model.

 

You asked:

"Does it matter if that's the way nature actually behaves?"

 

Well, if you're just talking about a constant "c", unrelated to the physical reality of the speed of light in a vacuum, then no. But once you apply a physical meaning to that constant; pull it off the page and relate it to something real, then yes. I would think that it would be important to define models in such a way that they accurately portray the way nature behaves, not just an accurate curve fit for the observable outcomes.

 

Again, I don't know one way or the other. Nuclear physics is not my forte. You may very well be correct. This is just something worth mentioning in the context of theoretical physics.

[swansont]

The speed of light is related to the permittivity and permeability of free space. That's the connection that led to the realization that light is an EM wave. The values of ^{[math]\mu[/math]} and ^{[math]\epsilon[/math]} also give the index of refraction, which ties into the actual speed of propagation of an electromagnetic wave through a medium.

 

Even though it's all a model (based on Maxwell's equations) that's enough reality for me.

[reverse]

QUOTE=boxhead]oh sure but you have to wait for few billion years till the laws of physics changes with time.

 

I see your point mr Boxhead.

we have only been testing these laws for about two hundred years.

Every statistician would call that a poor and small sampling.

 

but My Boxhead, they tell me that the light that reaches us from distant stars is very very old.

 

does that fact alter your view of the sample size?