Is Einstein About To Be Dethro
A whiff of heresy is in the air. There are very few beliefs in science that have the force of doctrine, but among them is the conviction that the speed of light is fixed. It forms the rock upon which Einstein built one of the 20th century's most enduring monuments, the General Theory of Relativity.
But in science nothing is sacred, and several leading theoretical physicists are now toying with the delicious notion that the speed of light may not be constant after all - but may actually have varied during the 15 billion years the Universe has existed.
To some, it remains anathema. "It took us a year to get the first paper published in Physical Review," says Dr Joâo Magueijo, a young ...
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as a research fellow at St John's, and now London. But if he is right, Einstein's conviction that light travels at a fixed and unalterable speed is about to be dethroned.
Dr Magueijo and colleagues with whom he has worked - Dr Andy Albrecht, of the University of California at Davis, and Professor John Barrow, of Cambridge - were not quite the first to have this idea. Dr John Moffat of the University of Toronto had floated it, but they were unaware of his work until he complained it hadn't been properly acknowledged in the Physical Review.
Of course, nobody would make such a radical suggestion unless there were something amiss with existing cosmological theories. The Big Bang and its offspring, inflation, are extremely well-established. They can explain a lot of what we see when we look into the great beyond. They claim that the Universe began from a single point, and has been expanding outward ever since. Simple as this seems, it raises some puzzling dilemmas. If the speed ...
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ever, and one which would stop expanding and contract again into a Big Crunch. Cosmologists call such a Universe "flat".
For this to have happened, the initial conditions, such as temperature, would have had to be exactly right - for which there is no good reason. Some argue that this question is irrelevant because if it hadn't been so, we wouldn't be here to worry about it anyway. The Universe, and life, could never have evolved. But most find this explanation rather feeble.
There are yet more problems. One is the evidence, gathered in the past few years by two teams studying supernova explosions, that the expansion of the Universe seems to be speeding up under the influence of an ...
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"Is Einstein About To Be Dethro." Essayworld.com. January 23, 2004. Accessed November 22, 2024. http://www.essayworld.com/essays/Is-Einstein-About-To-Be-Dethro/1878.
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