I hope its on topic BUT is there evidence there is a speed of light? Is lighting speeding from here to there? Is there any evidence? I understand they say gravity waves go the speed of light! Seems bery unlikely two forces would have the same exact speed!
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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
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Well I may have to disagree.
Equation (23) says the ratio of the acceleration of the Universe scale factor to the first derivative of the scale factor minus the ratio of the first derivative of the speed of light to the speed of light is greater than zero.
Whereas, in a classical Friedmann Universe, that equation should end with “= 0”.
The point is, that acceleration may have been so enormous in the opening moments of creation that the Universe literally inflated to its current size, then “coasted” at the canonical speed of light (of course, ignoring space expansion) for the last 6000 years. Since all constants, involving c would have followed suit, then we should in theory never really be able to detect that enormous, up-front activity today. So the idea of a young Universe cannot so quickly be dismissed.
Either I am really right or really wrong. Others are invited to chime in and add their agreement/disagreement.
Hi @r_speir,
The current rate of expansion has been measured has it not?
Have you familiarized yourself with astronomers’ research on the current rate of expansion? If it were slower than the canonical speed of light, would that not defeat your conjecture?
Best,
Chris
EDIT: I would think that your conjecture is in disagreement with many classes of astronomical data. How would you explain standard candles at a distance of billions of light years? How would you explain the differing chemical composition of old galaxies vs. younger galaxies – a difference that is well-explained by lambda-CDM?
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None of this would be affected by Eq (23). The equation is simply a cosmogony of first events to super inflate the Universe to really – any size. Expansion today, observation today, should not be affected by that cosmogony. Age would not be a factor either. Ancient, young should not matter since any evidence of a superluminal inflation at the start would be covered over, hidden by the fact that all constants were equally affected.
Also don’t get hung up on my “coasting” remark. The system may very well be accelerating today and all observation would be exactly as we presently note it to be – again, even if the superluminal event occurred over billions of years or 6000 years.
Edit; above I said “…even if the superluminal event occurred over billions of years or 6000 years.” No, no no. Wrong. What I should have said was “even if the time elapsed since the superluminal event was billions of years or only 6000 years.”
Alright. Let me spell it out clearly. I went out on a limb and said that I believe Eq (23) allows for a 6000 year old Universe exactly like the one we currently observe. I stated that it would be due to a superluminal inflation of the system within the first moments of creation, then a sudden drop in speed, where for the last 6000 years, the usually understood canonical c - speed of light - has been in operation.
Am I wrong?
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First of all, @r_speir, I really appreciate that you are asking for genuine feedback, rather than asserting as some do that because mainstream science has not figured out everything, that nothing about mainstream science is reliable. You want to know whether an idea makes sense in light of the data today, rather than speculate about where things might be 50 years from now. Kudos.
I am certainly not an expert, so I hope that someone like @PdotdQ or @pevaquark can chime in. The really big problem with your novel idea, in my opinion, is that (a moment of dramatic inflation) + (6000 years of relative stasis) does not leave room for galactic evolution and stellar evolution. Hubble has shown us a lot about how stars and galaxies develop by showing us various clouds of gas in various stages of the process. What Hubble has not shown us is the ability of a cloud of gas to become a star or a galaxy of stars in a year, a century, or even a millenium.
Best,
Chris
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Yes, tons of it. They have even filmed light moving about at those speeds. It involves some pretty cool tech:
I don’t see why you would think it is unlikely. Both light and gravitational waves lack mass and are propagating through the same spacetime, so I would expect them to travel at the same speed.
Edited to add:
There is a pretty cool experiment that anyone can do using a chocolate bar and a microwave. You can get a rough measure of the speed of light at home:
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I am curious about what evidence led you to this conclusion.
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Now we are asking the right questions. Let’s hopefully hear confirmation of your concern from others.
So say you are correct. We are left with two options. 1. God created the cosmos to look like it does today - collisions, scars, skid marks, etc - in midstream action. Kind of a false history. …or 2. Via a miracle, he accelerated an authentic history along with the acceleration of the inflation. Hmmm
Type Ia supernovae would also seem to be a problem since these type of supernovae all explode with the same amount of mass. Since E=mc^2, if the speed of light were faster in the past then type Ia supernovae should have higher luminosity with the same amount of mass. We should also see differences in their evolution through time. None of these are seen. All type Ia supernovae throughout the universe appear to release the same amount of energy and evolve in the same fashion.
This isn’t limited to just type Ia supernovae. Emission and absorbance lines are also tightly linked to the speed of light and energy. We shouldn’t see the same spectral lines elsewhere in the universe if the speed of light were different since this would change the energy levels between oribtals and therefore change the wavelength of light the atom absorbs or emits. A change in the speed of light would also change the balance between mass, the rate of fusion, and the amount of energy released by fusion in all stars which should result in a very different range of colors and sizes than what we see.
In the end, the speed of light is a fundamental constant of nearly all physics. If you change the speed of light it will drastically change the physics we see going on in the rest of the universe, and those changes just aren’t seen.
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In my experience, once you introduce miracles you are admitting that the evidence doesn’t support your hypothesis and/or supports a different hypothesis. Otherwise, you wouldn’t need to invoke miracles.
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Is there are 3rd option? If the speed of light is accelerated, all are processes accelerated and aged in super rapid fashion?
Question. Since the physical constants would also be affected in Maguiejo’s proposal does that preclude a rapid aging of the elements and overall system in the superluminal upfront expansion?
The answer should be easy. Take the inflationary model. The system basically expands superluminally from nothing to the size of a grapefruit with no change to the time value or age of metric.
The answer has to be No. The system remains young. If it is 6000 years old today, then it would not have an authentic history if God did not supply it.
Sorry for the detour. I have to think things through, then move on.
It wouldn’t result in “rapid aging”. It would result in completely different physics that would be easy to spot out in the universe. Speeding up the speed of light might make things age faster in Hollywood movies, but not in the real world.
It is also interesting to note that many ID/creationist supporters use the Fine Tuning argument. This requires very precise physical constants for things like star formation and a universe that won’t kill us with radiation. The fundamental forces along with the speed of light are among those finely tuned constants. You can’t start turning those dials without catastrophic results.
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Don’t take it too far. Your argument at some point is no longer with me but Maguiejo.
If light speed increased (by the amount needed in the YEC models) wouldn’t this affect the pressure and inside stars, since all those bouncing protons would be traveling faster and colliding more frequently? I would think this would reduce the maximum size of a star as well as its rate of fuel consumption, but I don’t know.
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Sorry but your problem is with Maguiejo. That equation obviously means that the 13 billion year history of the universe can be sped up without any consequences and this cannot be falsified since any any attempt to do so will just give the impression of a long history. Unfortunately this equation means measurements of the expansion history also are misleading as this all happened in a fraction of a second 6,000 years ago:
No, his theory of infinite light speed is only operational in the “very early” universe. The formations of stars and galaxies still take billions of years.
How is the Maguiejo conjecture testable? Is there any evidence that could refute it? Does the fact that the speed of light is identical today to its speed in the Michelson-Morley experiment have any bearing?