You make a serious accusation against the character of members of the physics community when you allege that Proton-21 can’t get papers published due to ubiquitous prejudice against outliers.
I’m no physicist, but I do keep track of the popular literature produced by the physics community. My impression is that outliers are welcomed and published all the time, as long as the authors have worked hard to disprove the anomalies and have done a rigorous error analysis. I find it far easier to believe that Ademenko and his cohort have failed to perform a rigorous error analysis, than to believe that they are being unfairly treated by the rest of the physics community.
The proton radius puzzle is an example of the willingness of the physics community to publish outliers. In 2010 Pohl challenged the decades-old belief that the proton radius is 8.77 femtometers. That belief was based on 2 different independent methods of measurement, spectroscopy and nuclear scattering, that were in close agreement. Moreover, they were based on a physical constant known as the Rydberg constant. But when Pohl’s measurements using hydrogen with muons in place of electrons reached a Rydberg constant that was 4% smaller, the result was not published in some vanity journal. No! It was published in Nature.
This finding resulted in much speculation. For example, scale relativity, a geometry-based way of making “constants” variable, was proposed in April 2019. Other weird interactions were proposed. The Institute for Creation Research enthusiastically jumped on the controversy:
The discrepancy between the two measurements (~4%) doesn’t seem like much, but in subatomic physics it is huge and presents physicists with another problem in understanding the proton. Physicists Ingo Sick and Dirk Trautmann believe we may not fully understand the ramifications of each experimental setup.
Are some of the models so many physicists have put their faith in (GUT, QED) still tenable or are they breaking down? One would think that history has taught us to be very careful about the object of our faith!
For almost a decade, physicists puzzled while critics like ICR crowed. But a few days ago, the controversy came to an abrupt end. Eric Hessel and his team at York University published their findings from 8 years of work using an improved spectroscopic technique. The best spectroscopic technique now shows that the radius of a proton is 0.833 ±0.01 femtometers, which is in exact agreement with Pohl’s finding. It turns out that the whole controversy had simply been an artifact of inexact measurement.
I wish I could say that the ICR immediately corrected their 2014 article lauding the controversy, but so far they have not.
In conclusion:
- The physics community is willing to publish controversial findings when the error analysis is robust.
- There is likely a very good reason that Proton-21’s results have not been published in credible journals.
- Discrepancies in “constants” could very well be artifacts of measurement error.
This is why I think your speculations are far short of the empirical justification that would be needed to support VSL and “neo-Lorentzian” hypotheses that would reduce the age of the universe to a few thousand years. (There may be forms of the VSL hypothesis that make conjectures about the first instant of the universe’s existence. They do not even remotely support an age of the universe that would be lower than several billion years–much less a few thousand years.) @PdotdQ’s many posts, and even my earlier citations to Lamoreaux and Torgerson and to Roberts provide greater details.
Also, I have a question about your claim that Lisa Randall has seriously proposed a variable speed of light hypothesis. The only thing remotely close to this I have been able to find is a quote where she mused about faster than light travel:
“Travel at faster than the speed of light certainly can have dramatic implications that are difficult to understand, such as time travel.”
This is clearly not a serious argument for VSL.
I also found an interview where she speculates that at Planck scale, standard physics might well break down. However, at anything above the Planck scale, she affirms that the usual rules still apply:
“I mean, 10 to the minus 35 meters, it’s not a scale that we encounter, and it’s a scale that we’re readily averaging over all the time, which is really how physics proceeds. So you don’t need to know the most fundamental. You don’t need to know if space is ultimately quantized. It works pretty fine to say the smooth space and general relativity applies to it.” [My emphasis]
I have not read all of Randall’s work, so perhaps I am misunderstanding something here. But it seems to me, based on what I have cited, that you are quite mistaken when you attribute to Randall a serious VSL hypothesis operating above the Planck scale that would lead to a conclusion of a universe that is orders of magnitude younger than 13.8 billion years.
The distance to the Andromeda Galaxy is clearly above the Planck scale, right? According to Randall, above the Planck scale you can assume space is smooth and apply general relativity with confidence. If Randall is right, then, the light that is reaching us today from the Andromeda Galaxy was emitted 2MYA.
Best,
Chris Falter