I remember in college some of our friends would on occasion discuss "cosmic things". One of my friends was a very smart electrical engineering student. He had his own little theory (not fleshed out, but you'll get the idea):
That the universe when (if it) contracts and re-emerges changes various physical constants (Planck's Constant, the speed of light, gravitational force, etc.) might change too. This would have all kinds of interesting knock-on affects (like life!). My friend's notion, of course, cannot be proved.
But, can we really prove that the above three examples never change?
OROBTC I am among those who thinks your friend may be correct.
I have explained that we can't exist (the past and future will collapse) if there could exist an absolute truth...
Please review my archives for the recent posts explaining the science of what I have just written above. Perhaps CoinCube could quote for you all if he is interested, to prove he even understood what I had been writing lately (not sure if he does).
iamnotback you have not made the case that an absolute truth cannot exist though perhaps you made this argument somewhere I am not aware of. In your essay
The Universe you instead made this claim.
"If the speed-of-light were infinite, the time domain (and thus reality) would collapse to a single point, because all future changes in configuration would occur instantly."
There are a minority of scientists who believe that this is the exact the condition of the universe at the start of the big bang.
Scientists Think the Speed of Light Has Slowed, and They're Trying to Prove Ithttp://motherboard.vice.com/read/light-speed-slowedBut in the late 1990s, a handful of physicists challenged one of the fundamental assumptions underlying Einstein’s theory of special relativity: Instead of the speed of light being constant, they proposed that light was faster in the early universe than it is now.
This theory of the variable speed of light was—and still is—controversial. But according to a new paper published in November in the physics journal Physical Review D, it could be experimentally tested in the near future. If the experiments validate the theory, it means that the laws of nature weren’t always the same as what we experience today and would require a serious revision of Einstein’s theory of gravity.
"The whole of physics is predicated on the constancy of the speed of light."
...
So just how much faster was light speed just after the Big Bang? According to Magueijo and his colleague Niayesh Afshordi, an associate professor of physics and astronomy at the University of Waterloo, the answer is
“infinitely” faster.The duo cite light speed as being at least 32 orders of magnitude faster than its currently accepted speed of 300 million meters per second—this is merely the lower bounds of the faster light speed, however.
As you get closer to the Big Bang, the speed of light approaches infinity.
On this view, the speed of light was faster because the universe was incredibly hot at the beginning. According to Afshordi, their theory requires that the early universe was at least a toasty 10
28 degrees Celsius (to put this in perspective, the highest temperature we are capable of realizing on Earth is about 10
16 degrees Celsius, a full 12 orders of magnitude cooler).
As the universe expanded and cooled below this temperature, light underwent a phase shift—much like liquid water changes into ice once the temperature reaches a certain threshold—and arrived at the speed we know today: 300 million meters per second. Just like ice won’t get more "icy" the colder the temperature gets, the speed of light has not been slowing down since it reached 300 million meters per second.
If Magueijo and Afshordi’s theory of variable light speed is correct, then the speed of light decreased in a predictable way—which means with sensitive enough instruments, this light speed decay can be measured.
"Varying speed of light is going back to the foundations of physics and saying perhaps there are things beyond relativity."
...
Now that they’ve used the variable light speed theory to put a hard number on the spectral index, all that remains to be seen is whether increasingly sensitive experiments probing the CMB and distribution of galaxies will verify or overturn their theory. Both Magueijo and Afshordi expect these results to be available at some point in the decade. But Marsh and other physicists aren't so sure.
If their theory is correct, it will overturn one of the main axiom’s underlying Einstein’s theory of special relativity and force physicists to reconsider the nature of gravity. According to Afshordi, however, it is more or less accepted in the physics community that Einstein’s theory of gravity cannot be the whole story
it was observed by Hubble at the beginning of the XX century that galaxies appear to be moving away from the Earth at a velocity that is proportional to their distance from us. The standard explanation is that galaxies are being thrown apart from the expansion of space-time. Imagine drawing some red spots on a balloon and inflating it, the spots (galaxies) would recede from each other at a speed proportional to their distance due to the dilatation of the plastic (space-time). The drawback of this hypothesis is that it needs to postulate the existence of the famous dark matter, which has never been observed and would still constitute 70% of the Universe’s mass. However, if c were decreasing over time, the Hubble effect would turn out to be a simple optical effect, eliminating the need to postulate the existence of the dark matter, as proposed by P. I. Wold back in 1935.
The evidence reported by Sanejouand points towards a possible slowing down of c of about 0.02-0.03 m/s per year. This is extremely small compared with the actual value of c: it would be like having 1 billion dollars in a bank account and losing a few cents per year. However, "the constancy of the speed of light is one of the fundamental pillars of contemporary physics," explains Sanejouand, "so the possibility that it may instead vary (even at a slow rate) has far reaching consequences (although mostly on the theoretical side)." Even though the hypothesis of the slowing down of the speed of light is still a very speculative one, "people like Barrow, Magueijo, as well as John Moffat," Sanejouand concludes, "have opened the way by showing that physically consistent theories in which the speed of light is varying in time can indeveloped in a safe and rigorous way."
Speed of Light Not so Constant After Allhttps://www.sciencenews.org/article/speed-light-not-so-constant-after-allResearchers led by optical physicist Miles Padgett at the University of Glasgow demonstrated the effect by racing photons that were identical except for their structure. The structured light consistently arrived a tad late. Though the effect is not recognizable in everyday life and in most technological applications, the new research highlights a fundamental and previously unappreciated subtlety in the behavior of light.
The speed of light in a vacuum, usually denoted c, is a fundamental constant central to much of physics, particularly Einstein’s theory of relativity...The researchers produced pairs of photons and sent them on different paths toward a detector...Measurements revealed that the structured light consistently arrived several micrometers late per meter of distance traveled.
